 Hi everyone. We're just going to give it a couple of moments to let people sort of filter in from the waiting room. So thank you for joining us and let's just give it a couple of minutes before we need that camera off. Okay brilliant. I think let's make a start and inevitably I think people will join us but I think I know that there's lots of ground that we want to cover today. So welcome everybody. Good evening and thanks for coming along to the final session of the Black British Artist and Political Activism Public Lecture Course. My name is Lizzie Robles and I'm a lecturer at the University of Bristol and together with a wonderful team at the Paul Mellon Center I've had the pleasure of convening for previous sessions. We've opened up some of the issues and tensions that arise at the perforated boundaries between art and political activism. We've heard from artists including Ingrid Pollard and Gavin Yatchee's and considered the ways in which the relationship between art and the world to borrow from Stuart Hall might be read through the examples of the lives and work of artists such as Rashid Arene and Ronald Moody. Tonight it's my very great pleasure to introduce you to our speakers for this evening the artist Marlene Smith and the art historian Alice Correa. Dr Alice Correa is an independent art historian. Her research examines late 20th century British art with a specific focus on artists of African, Caribbean and South Asian heritage. She's published articles in art history, British art studies, sculpture journal, and third text. In 2017 she was a mid-career fellow at the Paul Mellon Center for the Study of British Art where she initiated her ongoing research project articulating British Asian art histories. She's currently coming to the end of a research fellowship at the Decolonizing Arts Institute in London and is also working as a research curator at Touchstones Rochdale on a major exhibition project titled the Radical Decade Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s. And to briefly pause my introduction I realized I forgot to do the housekeeping. Sorry you'd think after six weeks of this I would remember the basic order of events. So the lecture, this conversation will be followed by an opportunity to ask some questions. So I invite you to put those into the Q&A box using the Q&A function on your screens. The session will be recorded and made available at a later date on the Paul Mellon Center's channels so keep your eye out there. And closed captioning is available if that's something that you need. You can click the CC button on your screen to enable captioning. Right, so on to the rest of the introduction. So to now introduce Marlene Smith. Marlene's an artist and curator. In the early 80s she was a member of a group of young black artists that included Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper and Claudette Johnson that under the name The Black Art Group organized a series of exhibitions under the title The Pan-African Connection and a series of seminal conferences including the First National Black Art Convention at Wolverhampton in 1982 and later the Working Convention for Artical Black Art. She's taken on curatorial and organizational roles at the now-stoyed Black Art Gallery based in Finsbury Park before taking on the directorship of the public in West Bromwich. More recently together with Piper and Johnson she formed the Black Art Group Research Project to examine afresh the archives and historical legacies of the Black Art Group and the milieu that has come to be known as a British Black Arts Movement more broadly by a series of interventions including an exhibition in 2012 at the Graves Gallery in Sheffield and an international conference at the University of Wolverhampton. During 2015-18 she completed a PhD examining the role women's exhibition history played during that decade in shaping the art of the time. During this period she was also a UK research manager for the AHRC funded Black Artists in Modernism project supported by the Art Fund, a three-year research scheme focused on relationship between the work of artists of African nation descent and modernism. She is director of the Room Next to Mine and associate of the Making History's Visible Project and associate artist at Modern Art Oxford. Marlene's work together with a short film that she's produced can currently be found in the exhibition Cut and Mix at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham and as a member of the Black Art Research Project she is working with the team at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games to realize a project next year more to be announced soon so keep your eye out for that. Anyway enough from me over and welcome and thank you so much for coming. Marlene and Alice I leave it to you. Thank you. Thanks Lizzie for that wonderful introduction. I've got some slides so I will share my screen. Okay hopefully everyone can see those and right so I move forward. Here we go okay so I'm really looking forward to speaking to you today Marlene. Hopefully we're going to have really fantastic generative conversation. Just so everyone knows at home Marlene and I have talked through some of the slides previously in preparation for today but we're going to perhaps draw out some things that we haven't touched on before but the title of today's session Black British Artists and Political Activism She is Not Bulletproof takes its title from a mixed media installation that Marlene created for the hugely important exhibition The Thin Black Line curated by Labena Higged and staged at the Institute of Contemporary Art from November 1985 to January 86 the exhibition included a range of artists working in a range of media including paintings, photography, sculpture and the exhibition itself knowingly acknowledges the ways in which Black women artists are marginalised to liminal transitionary spaces within art institutions. Marlene you've told me previously that you made the piece Good Housekeeping 1 shortly before making this piece you'd been on a march in protest at the shooting very gross by police in her home in Brixton in 1985 so to start with I wondered if you could just sketch perhaps the political context in which you were working at the time and how that might have informed your approach to art making I'm sure we'll pick up some of those themes and ideas but just as a general introduction over to you. So by the time that I was taking part in Thin Black Line I'd already been a member of the Black Art Group since 1982 so I'd had three years really of working with Claudette, Eddie, Keith and Donald and the other two female members of the group at the time were Wendell Leslie and Janet Vernon so we'd so the Black Art Group had done both conventions by that point so in 1982 when I first joined we were working towards the first National Black Art Convention which was at Wolverhampton and in 84 we did a smaller convention that was in Nottingham and that was the working we wanted to we were trying to make it into more of a working event than the first woman being but that wasn't particularly successful but in terms of the context I think just recalling the fact that I'd been on this march and that those ideas were crumbling through my head at the time that I was making this probably gives you the best kind of overview that I could offer you as to what led to me making Good Housekeeping 1. I was I'd taken a year out of my studies so I was still on the books at Bradford School of Art and I had rushed down to London because I felt as though everything was happening in London and I felt really isolated up in Bradford because even though there were other Black and Brown faces on the course that I was doing I didn't really find anybody in Bradford who was as politicised as I was when I said politicised what I mean is that I was really paying attention to what was happening in the news I was really paying attention to what was happening on the streets in the UK and the shooting of Cherry Gross really was a focal point not just for me but for lots I think of lots of young Black people because what what had been happening was that because of the SUS laws the police really seemed to have it was like they were having free-for-all and you know young Black people especially young Black men were being stopped and searched all the time that was a really difficult difficult period so those are the things that I think about when I think about 1985 I think about SUS and about policing and poor policing but also the other context I think that was international for us was the context of South Africa so the two things that I remember going on marches about during the 80s were the march the the march that happened in protest against what had happened to Cherry Gross and the and several marches around apartheid and around immigration so one of the things I also did around this time was I joined a tour of the SARI squad and the SARI squad was a bunch of really dynamic and political Asian women mostly who were campaigning for Afia Begum I don't remember the details of her immigration case but she was she was somebody who was in danger of being deported back to Bangladesh I think it was Bangladesh that she was from so I saw myself very much in 1985 and in 1985 I was what 20-21 I saw myself very much as somebody who was politically interested both in what was happening locally nationally and in the international aspects of the news and particularly motivated to understand that from the context of a racialized to understand about race and representation in that context brilliant what a fantastic introduction to the evening that's fantastic so what I'd like to do now is perhaps skip back in time a little bit because you've already mentioned the black art group and your colleagues Keith Piper, Eddie Chambers and Donald Rodney and Claudette Johnson and Leslie Wendell Leslie sorry but what is astonishing to me talking to you is just how young you were when you came in contact with these other art students you weren't even at art college yet you were doing your foundation as I understand and so you started your BA at Bradford Art College in 1983 but you've said that this poster from 1982 was seeing this poster was a really pivotal moment for you yeah absolutely so what had happened was that while I was doing my A levels at school I've been researching into we had to do a piece of independent study as part of our A level course and I decided that what I wanted to do was to research black art black artists and I said this many times my my tutors at school my teachers rather at school were really worried that I wouldn't be able to find any material because they didn't know any black artists so there was almost this feeling that that you know I wouldn't be able to find black artists because they didn't exist and so I've been through that process of having that response and then finding when I went to when I did try to find black artists what I found was lots of well not lots but I found material about the black arts movement in the US though the sort of 1960s to 1970s movement that happened there and so most of the writing that I did during that last year of my A levels was about work that had happened in a US context but I did manage to find one small group of artists that was based in Birmingham which included amongst that lot that's when I met Vanley Burke the photographer and I also managed to make contact with individual artists that were based in the UK because there'd been an auction that had been organised by the London School of Economics and there'd been a small a tiny little article about the auction appeared in the Sunday papers and one of my tutors at school found it and sent gave it to me so through that route I was able to make contact with Frank Bowling, Ronald Moody and a few others including Shakadedi who is the who would then go on to went on to open the Black Art Gallery so what happened was that I went down to London with a friend and went to see the show and then I just hand wrote a note to the to the organisers asking them to pass on my letters to the artists and that's how I'm going to get in touch with these people and so I remember writing to to Frank Bowling and to Ronald Moody because they were amongst the artists that actually wrote back to me but I think I wrote many letters and I think that I all together three artists responded and those were Shakadedi, Ronald Moody and Frank Bowling that's amazing so then so I've had all of this amazing stuff happen to me already and then one Saturday morning my mother dropped his envelope into my bedroom I was being I was being a typically lazy 17 year old and she dropped an envelope on my bed and when I opened it I found this poster folded inside what I hadn't realised was that my mother was working just so happened that she was in hope she was working with Keith Piper's father they were both working in the same hospital both working for the NHS and I can only assume because I don't think I ever found that I ever grilled her about this I can only assume that when they were they were they both worked the night shifts so I can only assume that they compared notes about their wayward children and how difficult it was raising children in the UK and found out that both had this interest in art and then because the the poster was addressed to me so I think that that was Keith Piper's father sending me that poster and so I went along to the iPhone gallery which is a gallery that I knew very well I've been to lots of events there and I met Keith Piper there and he was the only member of the black art group that was actually at the opening and he had he literally had white paint on his hands because he just finished installing the work when we when I got there for you know whatever time it was six or 6 30 or whatever it was and yeah so that was really how I how I got to meet them but but the point about the poster is that I've read lots of radical black statements related to the black art movement in the US and you know I'd kind of understood and got very excited by the prospect of those types of radical radical aesthetics if you like but what happened when I opened the poster was that I was reading the same types of statements but this time they were made by young black people from the same kind of background as me and I realised that there was something happening right there and then in that same in nice in proximity to me and that made me really excited so I remember very well that the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I read this poster and it still remains one of my favourite posters of all the black art group posters even though it's it's just black it's so simple yeah yeah that's amazing I mean one of one of my questions was going to be what what on earth did your family think about you going off to meet an artist who was already at art college and then being recruited into an arts collective but perhaps you've answered that question because there's a context if your your mother knew Keith's father I'm not sure what they made of it really I think they thought I was a bit eccentric and that you know a bit of a rabble rouser and probably thought that it was better than I was getting involved and doing some of that you know there's lots of things that young teenagers can get up to that is you know much more worrying than going to lots of meetings and putting art in galleries so so I don't remember my parents ever showing any signs of worry about it right well you were not sure that they understood what I was doing though well you were recruited really quick and in our previous discussion you think that this work entire woman was shown in a black art group exhibition in 1982 so I was wondering if you could explain what it's showing and what your motivations for this for this mixed media piece was around the same time that I was recruited into the black art group I I mean I would say that my politicization came through just being curious and wanting to know more about my own history and I started this habit of going to a black bookshop that was not far from where my school was in still in Hansworth and in Grove Lane in Hansworth there was a Harambee bookshop I can't remember what Harambee means now but it's but it was the closest place for me to to get hold of this material and because I wasn't on a course or being tutored by anyone I really literally used to wander into the shop wander around the bookshop and look at book covers and titles and then decide based on the title and the cover of the book whether I was going to read it or not and I came across a book called a tie a woman which was written by Bell books and she has remained one of my favorite authors and not just author she's more of a she's a thinker and an activist as well as being a brilliant writer so one of the things that I read in that book was the a story about Sojourner Truth and Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist and a feminist an early feminist and there is a famous story about her at a rally and I think it was a rally for women's suffrage she was she she pulled she tore open her her blouse and revealed her breasts and she and she made a speech where she was kind of saying you know I I've had to work side side by side with men aren't I a woman and or are the entire woman it's it's a famous speech that she made I think I think she really I think it really did happen there is some there is some controversy about whether this really happened or not but I've read about it in in several different places and so she became I became obsessed with this idea that a woman should stand in a crowded room where she would have been faced by I assume a lot of white people where she would have been intimidated by them I guess is what I'm thinking and so I I started to I'm sorry I've just been distracted by June Reed's post about her umby and what her umby means but I can't really do so but I have to read it later but I was just so moved by the idea of this woman who was born in slavery who had endured so much during slavery and who was advocating both and abolition of slavery and universal suffrage and I was so impressed by her and taken with this moment that I made several pieces of work I think this is the first one that I made and if I can describe what it is yeah so there there's there's there's the black polythene which is literally just sheets of black polythene that I've stapled over to kind of create a frame um the first level is a pastel drawing and I've just drawn the upper torso and the breasts of of Sojourner Truth and then there's a Hessian sack that I've split open to to kind of indicate her clothing and there are two hands one of them is kind of more naturalistic it's a brown hand which I think there were some black felt tips that I used to draw the knuckles and fingers on that and then there's a red and green red and green hand which was again my kind of early um introduction to Pan-Africanism so I was thinking about the colours of that Pan-African flag and then then last but not least there's a little um pin that's got that um and the pin um attaches to the Hessian and I think on that pin on that sorry on that piece of paper that's attached to the Hessian I've written the quote out but unfortunately I can't read it from here so I think the quote from the from Sojourner Truth's speech amazing thank you such a powerful work and and so concise as well and obviously it's pretty clear that this image stuck with you because you went on and when you started college you went on to make a sculpt a three-dimensional sculptural version in clay um I was wondering if you wanted to say anything about the making of this work cool yeah the making of this work took up a large part of my first year was was spent making this I started off by making a small maquette which I made in the college and then once I started to build this piece and it's just about life size um it started to get the wrong kind of um the wrong kind of attention I found it really I've used the word intimidating them I found it really difficult to make the work that I wanted to make in the space that was provided to me by the art college I felt either completely isolated in that space or or as if I was being it's that whole thing about either being too visible or not visible enough there didn't seem to be a middle space between the two and um it didn't help that one of my tutors um the way that we worked at Bradford was that you had a rotated between one space and another you didn't have one permanent space the whole time you went from um one building to another and one space to another so um it didn't help that the tutor that I was that was working with me did a lot of quite um kinky work his work was quite SNM so he did lots of lots of images of black bodies lots of images of black female bodies when I say black I mean jet black um and you know he tried to kind of start up a conversation with me with me about what I was doing in comparison to what he was doing but I just wasn't appropriate and I so what I ended up doing was moving myself and my clay into my living room at home in my digs and I also um when I was trying to make this I used myself as a model for some of it and I used my very generous um housemate who also sat for me so because I was trying I really wanted to get the I just wanted it to be um anatomically um accurate in a way that some of the other pieces that I made didn't need it but somehow in the clay I wanted to really bring this woman to life wanted to birth her so um yeah I spent a lot of time working on her and um yeah it was quite a difficult birthing process but she is incredible and the visceral nature of her you can almost hear her screaming it's pretty incredible yeah I'm quite happy with this this piece what happened unfortunately was that um once I moved it back into the into the college into the studio uh it was destroyed before I could take any more photographs I mean I don't know what I would have done with it I think the thing to would have done would have been to make a mold of it so that I had some lighter weight um um versions um but I hadn't really made my mind the tutors in the clay workshop in the pottery decided that they needed the clay so what they did was they put the whole thing into a vat of water and it got reconstituted back down to clay so that was not a very happy moment for me no absolutely understandably I'd be furious on your behalf um but I wonder it was never shown anywhere it existed in the studio only which is I think it's quite sad I'm sad about that yeah yeah absolutely and I'm wondering whether or not that that some of that anger got channeled into these works because again these are so so resonant of violence and the way and colonial violence and the other way that um uh african imagery and visual culture is stolen and taken um by by european um modernists but also just british the way that we are our museums are stuffed full of looted objects um and that these these two works speak so powerfully to that but also perhaps I'm reading too much into it but perhaps also your own experiences no you're absolutely right I've hit the nail right on the head but you know in these works I'm thinking I'm contemplating and both that theft of um african objects um that are you know that are in all museums all over all over europe um and I'm also thinking about violence uh colonial violence but most more specifically sexual violence um so the words on the uh on the top that that that's that kind of circle that head say the most oh it's gone can you read them I can't see it um it's a bit small right let me just think you told me previously um uh the most sacred commandment that says come back to me the most sacred commandment violated and then the second one says and violated and I used um these images that I from um west africa both the the the larger image I think it's called an akuba it's a doll that is um that west african women use um which is related to fertility so it felt to me like a sort of a stand-in for black or particularly african womanhood and that's why I use I still and I find them just so beautiful and then the smaller image with which I've traced in blue is um from again from west africa and I think it's a west african artist's version of a portuguese slaver so I wanted to kind of put them in the frame yeah and um yeah that would that would make sense if he was a portuguese slaver because the sort of circular amulets were tokens that were used to buy um west african people to get for slavery yeah yeah um now you made these works sort of around the time you've already mentioned you were a member of the black art group at this time when you were making these works and in 19 yeah 1982 you and um the black art group organized the first national black art convention at wolverhampton polytechnic in october that year um it's already been mentioned but I'll just flag it again for audience members if you don't already know um in 2012 marlene um was part of um the black art research project um black art group research project and the website um which is available online obviously um has a whole wealth of information about the activities of the black art group but also incredibly um audio tapes of the convention so you we can listen to um rashi darin and frank bowling and claudette johnson speaking as in 1982 which was is pretty incredible um and as we've already mentioned there's an older generation of speakers rashi didn't bank bowling um but also a younger generation came to wolverhampton from across the country so lebania came from london simrath patty came from leeds um and i just wanted to if you could sort of reflect on um what was it about um this moment this conference that really made people from across generations working in different types of art different media what made them want to come together at this moment do you think i think um i think similar to me lots of the lots of the young art students found themselves in in colleges and art colleges where they were the only one and um the calling calling all black art students black artists and art students it's just a tantalizing possibility of community you know and so i think just as i had happily and gleefully leafed through books about what the radicalism of the um black artists in the us and then got really excited when i finally met some young black artists of my own age and background i think that that call kind of lit a fire under people that really wanted to be in community and to have peers you know it's so lonely to be by yourself when when when you're making art um and as you said um students came from all over the country and the thing about the day for me one of the highlights of the day was Rashi Doreen's keynotes on um art and black consciousness because for me he really contextualized what i thought i was doing and where i thought i was going and what was important uh so so he was one of the highlights and the second highlight for me was Claudette Johnson talking not just about the ideas but talking about her actual work um and i think everybody who attended had this had a similar similar experience yeah that's amazing i just wanted to say i first time i came across um the two works um the violated works was in Rashi's exhibition catalogue for the essential black art that he curated um in i think it was 88 um but you've you've also mentioned that you is it am i right in thinking you carried around your copy of making myself visible is that right yeah i can't remember what year making myself visible was published but i can tell you that i had a copy and it was very well-thumbed and that sometimes when particularly when i was in Bradford by myself and trying to do what felt in like almost impossible in in under siege felt like siege conditions sometimes having the right book in your bag just gave me a little bit more confidence and it was something to to hold on to um and i felt the same way i mean the things that i was reading so Rashi Doreen's making myself be visible is an astonishing book and i recommend it to everybody because in it he talks very candidly about his journey um into visibility and it's something that i and it's a story that i um that really resonates and then he talks about his first um naive sort of um excitement about modernist art and how much he wanted to be part of that movement and he talks about the ways in which he was undermined and marginalised and instead of being shamed by it which i think is what happens with racism is that when you are the victim of racism you you take on the shame of it and that makes you silent and Rashi like many other activists reminds us that we must not be silent we must speak we must speak we must make ourselves visible and um so i found his his work both inspiring and comforting brilliant brilliant um you've already mentioned that you met how you came in contact with Shakadedi but um again so in 1983 in your first year at university you participate in the inaugural exhibition Heart and Exile at the Black Art Gallery the first exhibition at that gallery which is gallery which is quite astonishing to me um the gallery was run by the organization for black arts advancement and leisure activities and it had a specific remit to exhibit work by artists of African descent and i was sort of wondering whether or not that was sort of a natural home for you given the black the black art groups sort of pan-African um uh sort of uh politics well i i think to begin with it was and i think this about my my reading and about my whole journey into um consciousness um i think that at first what one looks for is like-minded people from similar backgrounds that's where you kind of go to begin with and then it's only after a while that you've got the space i think and the confidence to read a bit more widely so at the beginning of 80 i think it was 83 that the um the black art gallery opened yeah so Heart and Exile is the first show in that space yeah when is that is that September 4th of September so um to begin with i was really excited that i was excited that there was going to be a place called the Black Art Gallery because it meant that there was a home that people could gravitate around and that it really um excited me that the next set of art students that wanted to find black artists wouldn't have to go to the same process that i went through if there was a home for black art so um to begin with i was really excited about the Black Art Gallery but as my politics developed um like i said to you i when i was at Bradford i went on the Shotsari squad tour for example so i really did have a i wasn't sure that pan africanism was where my politics would would land um and i think it's the same with nations i think coming out of in a post-colonial setting coming out of um bondage and coming out of um the colonial system what tends to happen is that you get sort of nationalist governments formed because that's the that's really the simplest way that you can understand your subjugation is to understand it as a as as something that's related to race but when you look up look wider there's the economics you know you can't really get around the economics and the economics are not about color the economics are something much more fundamental so um i found myself working at the black art gallery in 1985 to six when i took my year out and i found that i would often get into difficult and uncomfortable conversations about around this whole notion of pan africanism and the extent to which having a policy at the black art gallery of showing only african artists the extent to which that was progressive so i i thought it in the end wasn't very progressive that's really interesting um now in for this show part in exile yeah i've got it i'm sorry this is a not great slide it's taken from the exhibition catalogue but you exhibited a work called or was titled in the catalogue at least ain't we a woman um and what i think is really fascinating about this shows the statements in the catalogue that accompanies the image in which you critique head on the myth of the black superwoman the woman who is inordinately physically and emotionally strong and whose life is one of sacrifice and you state in your text that the women in your painting or mixed media collage painting are working just like generations of black women before them but quote what is different about these women is that they are that they will they will not be caricatured cruelly into black amazon's matriarchs super strong aggressives and totally self-reliant the black matriarchs are calling damaging a corruption of the truth um and you go on to say the black matriarch um however despite the fact that she is a fiction made made up by white colonialists she continues in our psyche in um you finish the text in our kitchens our canteens our laundry our hospitals um and i just just wondering if you could speak to this idea of the black superwoman and and um how you were addressing um that that caricature yeah it's it's a um it's it is not it's i can't deny that in my family as in many other immigrant families from from similar backgrounds so my parents came to the UK in 1950s and so i was raised by a whole generation of women who worked very long very hard hours and who managed to raise their families hold down a full-time job um look after their their homes and so because they're successfully doing all this it's it's very easy to see them as super women and to see them as to caricature them as um super strong but that doesn't allow for any vulnerability any failing any loneliness any um weakness and i very much wanted to in my images and i i was working i think you can see that i'm working through ways to talk about these women um which doesn't add to the stereotypes and it's very you know so i was trying to unpack what i wanted what it is that i want to do with my art and in a way i do want to pay tribute to those women but i don't want to do so by coming up with yet another set of cliches about who they are hmm so i one of the things that i notice about my work at that time is that there's very little i don't make them very beautiful and desirable make them quite there's a lot of pain in my early works i think and i think that that changes as i mature and then the work that i've made later doesn't even i kind of move away from the body it's as if i can't find a way to to work with the body that doesn't end up being about a body in pain and i want to get away from that i want to get away from the body in pain i want to get away from the pain and it felt it feels as though when i look on my work now had to in order to get away from the pain i had to relinquish the body if you don't mind staying with these works for a moment because i think this idea the clearly the this idea of the matriarch at the center of the family who is both strong and vulnerable is is at the core of this work good housekeeping one i think and on the one hand it reminds me of the sentiment that bell hooks talks about the the houses and homes are women's space there that there are special domain belonging to women but on the other hand this work is a very chilling reminder that the cost of creating that nurturing space can be very very high and very very painful so and in the catalogue to the thin black line you state that quote the nature of our art is predetermined by the nature of our existence so i wondered if you could speak to that a little bit this that i mean you've already touched on it a bit but if there was anything else you wanted to say about good housekeeping one um just to say that i i think you're right i mean the pieces that we were looking at just a while ago were made in 1983 and this is 85 so i've moved on a little bit here and i think in this image it is possible to see both the strength and the vulnerability of this woman and the tragedy that it refers to is a real one um and so i think that's what makes it quite chilling um but um what more can i say really about what if we talk about um just the medium then and the way i'm interested in the way that you're you we've seen examples of your work that already include text and image but i'm interested in this piece about your combination of text and family photographs and the sculptural object and and how you're thinking conceptually about about art making and how you combine your um components one of the things that we haven't talked about is that in in when i was on my foundation course i kind of fell in love with arte povera i don't i still don't know whether to pronounce it povera or povera but um so so when i was using those black plastic polythene sacks to frame the work this is a part of my of the way that i've been influenced to think about materials and so in this piece um the components are the text this this line that i draw which is like a border which is a um yeah it's like a border um but it denotes the kind of edge of a door or the beginning of a building so and then my and then i've placed the hand just inside of that that um border line and the the thing itself is made from chickboard which has been caught into a um into a into the shape of the body and then what i did was i built up the body using um plaster and it was household plaster and it felt important that it should be household plaster rather than the more refined stuff that we've got in the art colleges we needed to be rough and ready and then that is that plaster is held together with um some chicken wire and the whole thing is then um built on with some j-cloths and j-cloths for those that don't know just these blue cloths that have been used for decades and cleaning things um and then right behind and then the face is um i just drew the face actually it's um mostly pastels that i used to do the drawing on the face and then the photograph that is just behind her shoulder i really wanted her to appear to be guarding that photograph and so the photograph that's just behind her shoulder is a photograph from my family um from and it's the the event but that you can't really see that's happening in there is my it's my little sister's birthday and my youngest sister's christening so it's a combined family feast and everybody's kind of photographed around this adorned table so it's clear that so for anybody looking at it it's clear that it's a family celebration um and yeah i was thinking on many different i was thinking about the complexities and wanting to indicate things rather than um so you know i think that just by putting a few components together sometimes you can suggest something and i really like that about this piece that is you don't see an interior i don't provide an interior but you can construct your own as a viewer where in terms of the height of that piece i think it's about six foot high so viewers can can stand eye to eye with with the woman in this piece and they can also stand eye to eye with the photograph um and it's one of the the last times that i've made a physical body but i do think that this is quite a successful physical body um and it is kind of like a a body standing in for many bodies one of the things that nobody else will know is that my mother did have a dressing gown that was about that color so for me it really it really was a portrait of my mom but you know you'd have to know my mom to know that that is the case and um and that photograph really did come from my own home but i think that viewers would see that that that is that the photograph is something that is real because it's an object that's taken out of its out of its context and put into another context in the gallery but it kind of it almost it acts as a doorway um into a different into a different realm and i i was very very aware of that i really like the way that your use of text in this work um and the use of the words my mother because as an audience member i'm reading the words my mother and immediately thinking of my mother but but simultaneously trying to process oh well the artist means her mother and that ambiguity is um is a really powerful complex problem as an audience member looking at this work i'm trying to um position myself um in relation to to her yeah well i'm glad that that's working because that's what i want i want to have a conversation i want to i want the work to have a conversation with the viewer and i want the work to see my mother but also see their mother and see other mothers and see other women of that age and background and not even of that background but of that age you know um and to understand the vulnerability and in a way to understand how that vulnerability is being abused you know in certain in certain households so you know this woman is trying to provide a safe space but ultimately she's powerless to prevent the bullets hmm yeah the external forces yeah try as she might she's not bulletproof no and the other thing about that i like i like playing with the text of what nobody will know about this is that i i i was so um i was so twitchy on the day that we were installing this that i actually but asked um Trisha Babiz was to did the actual lettering for me so she actually got up there and painted the words but i also was playing with the size of the text so my mother is larger than opens the door at seven a.m so opens the door is a smaller text because it's an everyday thing you know she opens the door seven a.m is big because i want to remind people that it's seven a.m seven a.m is a time when you are just waking but if you're somebody like my mother who works nights in in for the national health service seven a.m is the time that you're finishing your shift yeah so i also want to to to raise this specter of what time is it and what time is it in your household and so what happens at seven a.m in your house boom and then it's not bulletproof nobody is bulletproof not even the super not even the black superwoman no no um after this moment of um the thin black line in 1985 you've mentioned that you took a year out from your ba as a sabbatical and you um 1986 seems to have been an absolute furious um explosion of activity um i got exhausted just looking at what you were doing so you curated um some of us are brave all of us are strong at the black art gallery um you exhibited in unrecorded truths at the elbow room um and you also curated um starring mummy and daddy and all of that those three exhibitions took place between february and june 1986 which is quite astonishing but you seem to be wrapping yourself um in a in a uh or surrounding yourself rather with this amazing cohort of of women artists um so i was wondering if you could say something about this exhibition and why it was so important to you to put this show on you know i kind of fell into this exhibition what happened was that um i was working as an assistant curator or in fact back in 1986 we didn't talk about curators so much as exhibition organizers i think i was assistant exhibition organizer at the black art gallery so i was working with quite closely with shaka who was the director and he was doing most of it he was leading on the programming and so the idea of putting on the show of women was something that he was not really very comfortable about so i remember one of the things that i loved about working at the black art gallery was that we had a kitchen where there was a big table and a small cooker and we used to spend a lot of time in conversation we at lunch times especially we would cook for each other and then we would have a conversation and it seems ridiculous now but back in the 1980s it wasn't unusual to hear people say things like you know if you're going to get involved in feminism you're dividing the struggle so whole idea that if women were organizing together there was somehow drawing attention away from the wider and more important issue of race so we had those types of conversations at the black art gallery and then to begin with um when the when the idea was agreed and it was almost like it was like a round table discussion in the in the staff room um to begin with shaka's wife eva kandina who was the head of the education part of the of the gallery team um initially it was his shaka's intention that eva should lead on the on this exhibition but she didn't feel comfortable doing that because she didn't feel that she had enough expertise and so it fell to me to organize it and so what we did was very much i think i really just followed i copied what um i'd seen libayna himid do for the thin black line because with the thin black line libayna wrote to us all and then she invited us to come to her house and we sat and talked about what the show was going to be and she provided tea and cake you know in a very kind of libayna himid way so what i thought that i would do um because i was living in a in a um flat in islington rather than invite people around to my flat what i did was i invited people to the kitchen to the kitchen in the black art gallery and we had a discussion about whether we wanted to put a show on or not and what the show would be about and so we agreed that we would the show would be i think it was amanda holiday that suggested the title and the title comes from a book of essays which i think i can't remember the name of the woman who um edited that book it's somebody sniffed but i can't think of the third's name um but there was a book called some of us are brave all of us are strong and we stole that title from that book and then um as we we worked what happens is that you have individual conversations with each of the artists and it just becomes more and more obvious that the show is essential and that it's really important to it's really important to take up space and to be noticed and to have a voice and to to say what is on your mind and what we agreed with some of us are brave all of us are strong is that we would contemplate our mothers and again i think that's probably my that was probably one of my influences because as you can see i'm kind of being as as obsessed as i was with the image of sojourner truth i was also one of my obsessions was with that generation of women and partly because i felt that they had sacrificed so much and it was payback time um so all of the women that took part in some of us are brave wrote um made work work most of it if not every single piece most of it was specifically made for the show and i think that's another thing that happens a lot when you look at the kinds of exhibitions that were being put on at the time whether it's a thin black line or unreported truths at the elbow room that the bena did she was she wasn't insisting that you make new work but she was creating a context into which artists wanted to create new work and so it was the same with some of us are brave i remember Louvena's piece for this show was called mirror cloth bowl there's an absolutely beautiful tiny quiet piece of work where she had an image of her grandmother marshalan and then she had a little wooden stool and a little towel rail really tiny little one and over on the towel rail she had um she'd woven what would have been a towel but she wrote it out of paper little pieces of paper that she'd woven together and it was just such a beautiful poignant quiet um dedication in a way to her grandmother that sort of tribute to her grandmother and i don't know if i thought it at the time but i certainly think now looking back at images of marshalan um that Louvena's physical she physically resembles her grandmother and mirror cloth bowl to me is a really intimate little piece that speaks so much about an intimate relationship between women of different generations um so yes i i agree with you but i think about a 1986 was the busiest year ever i think what had happened was that i'd taken the year off so that i was in london from the september of um 1985 through to the september of 1986 so i had you know i only had a little window and i was just trying to get as much done as possible so it goes back to the process i'm just going to skip forward because um sort of two things so you're just talking about that about making quiet intimate work and moving making work stepping away from the representing the body in your work i think comes through really powerfully in the um pamphlet for unrecorded truths in which you've written a poem which is surrounded by this black lace collar um but the poem is is about trying to make an artwork that is dedicated to a black woman or um and i think that was that's a really powerful thing so i was wondering if you could talk about um your text and the way that you're you're engaging with poetry and prose as well around time i think that um i'm somebody that loves words and very often when i'm making i start with words i don't start with a sketchbook i start with words and meaning and i i kind of work out what i mean to say with the words and then that leads me into choosing the materials and and making the making the the objects and with um with unrecorded truths i think because that came after in black line and i can't remember whether it came before or after some of us are brave but but i know that in some of us are brave i still had a cut out figure but the piece that i did for that show myself i had a cut out figure still and in um unrecorded truths was the first time that i tried to make an image of a black woman or speak about her life without using the body so it came before the piece that i did that's now at sheffield museums which is um yeah art history um and what what had happened is that we're in art history i've i asked my mother to crochet something that the the case that that vase is standing in this is a crocheted vase and the vase is and the crocheted vase is then stiffened using sugar and water and in the unrecorded truths piece i tried to make something that was like that but i used doilies just paper ones and i just felt very dissatisfied with how that worked formally i didn't feel like it worked i mean it worked well enough you know there was a good response to the piece but i just felt aesthetically i wanted to go back to the actual object so um so yeah yeah so you um returned to um your course yes um it was going to be the september of 1986 but just because you were on your course didn't mean you slowed down any um you curated with eddie chambers the image employed with Keith was on at corner house in manchester sorry sorry sorry Keith Piper eddie chambers was included in the show sorry um but that opened in june and at the same time you were having your degree show that's right which included art history so there's just bunkers do you know what i am so i went at the time that we were doing all this stuff it just felt like it had to be done it was there was a sense of urgency and so it wasn't so at that time of in my life it was very much it have an idea and work on it straight away and get it delivered whereas now in my life i'm very much more i work much i'm so much slower i think it's definitely slowed down for me but at that time it just felt like there was a burden of representation that one had and there were things that needed to be said and things that needed to be put out in the world and you know and i had i felt like i had to do it so um the corner house opportunity came up because they invited us um the corner house actually invited myself and Keith Piper to to collaborate on the image employed and that was a show of i can't remember how many artists were in that show about 12 i think 12 or 14 um and that was a huge undertaking but it made sense for me because i was coming towards the end of my i was doing my final year at um Bradford and i wanted to have a context and for me the college never provided enough of a context for me to for that to be all it was very cut off from the real world and so i i wanted them to consider the work that i did for the image employed as part of my degree um and it worked and didn't work i think that partly they felt that i was being a bit of an upstart because i think this was it i didn't i didn't really involve any of my tutors or any of the other students that at the college in the image employed and i think that they um because of that they didn't really i don't remember them saying well done i don't remember them particularly coming to see the show so astonishing giving that corner house was a major space a major exhibition space in Manchester but i'm conscious of time morning and um i wonder whether or not um there was anything else you wanted to say about history because in terms of what in this introduction she talked about art in the world and um in many ways i think art history does that really beautifully it talks about the real world and the art world and how these two um conjoin or can coalesce in some way and i was wondering if there was anything else you wanted to say about that no you've said that really beautifully and i mean apart from saying that the postcards in so i've already said that that art history the vase was made was crocheted by my mom so it's the only time i've ever collaborated with my mother on a piece of work but i'm so pleased that i did that right because she she passed away a couple of years ago and i said that work means even more to me now that that she's no longer with us um so she crocheted the vase the flowers were donated to me in by Trevor Madison whose mother also passed away and he he heard me distressing myself because what had happened was that the original flowers plastic flowers that i'd used in the piece um were no more i think i'd used them for um various other pieces of work actually not even for work um Alice i'd use them when my daughter had dressing up days all the all the plastic flowers have been used for for halos and fairy fairy dresses so um um i had to i so i was asking people asking around and asking people who have plastic flowers because i couldn't find any online or anywhere because now we don't have plastic flowers anymore we have these really wonderful really well made um fabric things that look like real flowers and i didn't want that i wanted the original old-fashioned 1970s 1970s 1970s plastic flowers that you could wash and so luckily for me Trevor Madison was um kind enough to let me have the the flowers from his mother's house and then the the images on the right hand side are all drawn from art history so the first one is oh gosh i'm going to forget i'm going to forget names um i won't tell you what would they all are there you go i was just about saying is it we'll have to jump in that's it she's Edmonia Lewis who was this astounding woman who even despite the fact that she was born into slavery managed to be a successful artist in the 19 in the 1800s uh there's a self portrait by Simone Alexander there are the hands of Magdalena Dundoo um photographed by Ingrid Pollard and then there's an astonishing photograph by Brenda Aguard of the writer that i don't know her name but it's Brenda Aguard's image and the image is titled a portrait of our times though it's so they're all very powerful images made by other black women and the whole thing sits on this shelf which is kind of i like to set it up to to be about the same height as a map mantle piece so it kind of gives you that sense of mental peace um and i first made that piece for my degree show and then i showed it you know 30 years later in the places here and um i showed it at Sheffield New Zealand's retrospective of the black art group which was in 20 from 2011 to 2012 it's one of my favorite pieces i have to say i think it's i think it's wonderful that you did it for your degree show because it speaks so powerfully to your a-level tutor who said that there weren't any black artists and and here they are in your degree show as you're about to in well i was going to say about embark embarking the world as as an artist but by this point you'd already curated and exhibited um so widely and established yourself and your career um i know that there are lot there's lots of chats going on i wonder if there is um there'll probably be lots of questions but i just want to very quickly just flag that your film rehearsal two is currently on um display new art exchange in Nottingham in a show called Cut and Mix curated by Ian Sargent um and if there was anything again you wanted to say about this um address address rehearsal two yeah just to say that i made a piece called address rehearsal in which is a performance piece that i did in about 2014 15 and so this is a second version in the first version i'm dressing and undressing and talking about my relationship with my parents and originally when i made that piece i thought i thought that the work was about them but it ultimately ended up being a sort of more about me than about them so i'm not sure if i like that um and then i've made the second version um when i made the first version my mom was still with us um and in this version i'm older um i made it this year so it's a very recent piece um but it's still talking about those family relationships but i think it leaves a lot more to be guessed at tonight i like the enigmatic nature of this piece and um and in the photograph that you can see there there's a photograph of me with my daughter on the shelf above me my daughter's called Wesley and she's named after my dad and in the photograph that you see there i'm wearing my dad's clover well i'm wearing his waistcoat um in in 2014 when i did the first version i was able to actually get into my parents clothing but i've put on weight since then so that wouldn't have been a possibility but i'm in in address rehearsal one i talk a lot and i dress and undress and i play lots of music from my parents music collection and in address rehearsal two i play one or two tunes and i sing along and dance so they're quite i really like them as a pair of as a pair of of works about about temporality they really are about time and space and relationships oh well marlene i could sit and listen to you talk for um hours more but i think we probably have to stop at this point so it's a great shame i'm really sorry um but lizzie i don't know at this point we've got time for a question or two or yeah i mean i yes i'm sure also burning with questions but there it has been a question in the chat box for a little while so i did want to get to it it's from nicholas brown um so nick writes a huge thanks to both the speakers always wonderful to hear you i wanted to pick up on something from very early in the conversation can you recall which specifically of the us black arts woman texts you and the other pan african connection black art group artists were influenced by what were the points of resonance but also differences as this was embraced and reinvented within a uk context oh my goodness if i can't remember what we what we were reading in those back then that's a really good question for me to answer um i and and because i've been asked that i um i can't remember any a single text at all to even fair enough well you've you've mentioned pre you've mentioned previously tony morrison and alice walker as certainly for me and for claudette and for the other women around tony morrison and alice walker were really important writers for us i think they might be different for the boys um but um yeah those those authors and you know morrison in particular for me i read um i read a compilation of um black american black american women authors writing in about 82 83 um and in that compilation were some excerpts from tony morrison's bluesty and it was i couldn't once i'd read the the those excerpts i couldn't wait to get to the book and it still is for me one of my favorite both um one of my favorite novels of all time and and you know i love all of her work brilliant thank you so much miley and yes no fair enough i can barely remember what day of the week it is most of the time nevertheless what i was reading uh a long time ago but thank you so much for such a generative and generous conversation i feel this is such a such an interesting conversation and i think really that is a really nice end to a series that wanted to open up these relationships between you know this thing that art is in the practice of art making and its relationship to the world both personal and political and i think their practice is so rich and and again so generative for doing just that um right so yes and to that and i it is now almost eight o'clock and i thank you both again for joining us for being so generous in conversation and also to everybody who's followed along um at home and to the paul melan center team for your support across the entire series so that's it from us folks uh thank you so much night thank you thank you malin bye bye bye