The first real artist I ever met was Godfried Donkor. Below is an image of one of his works my favorite.
It might sound bizarre but making work and being an artist was always a remote and otherworldly thing before then. Both my mother and father painted and sketched at home when I was a child but they did not consider themselves "proper artists" and their works languished in our attic or remained unmade at all. Godfried not only considered himself a proper artist, others did too, and he was invited to speak at a conference which I also was invited to in his capacity as an artist. His being so modest and unassuming so down to earth and yet passionate about his work was key in my understanding that the title of artist was not only for dead white men from other parts of Europe, but possible for a living black man in England. This was for me nothing short of amazing and his careful work that stepped though thorny issues with great panache set a tone that seemed at once heroic and possible. Still it barely seemed possible to whisper that I wanted to claim the title "Visual Artist" but the clock had started ticking.
At school we were encouraged to pick an artist and copy one of their works. I found Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in one of my German Grandfather's art books at home and would copy his paintings for hours in the showers whilst avoiding PE Physical education or sports lessons. This is one of the images I made over and over:
I don't know how I got to art school I guess it started with an absence. The absence of my entire work for that first precious year when I had my first leaky cold studio in East London when a former partner used it to pay 6 months of owed back rent, galvanized me too take my practice seriously. The loss of a job made me reconsider what I really wanted to do and what I could do in a remote part of Germany with my new partner who had commitments in Bavaria. Great sales at black art fairs in America led me on and the absence of my favorite black artists from these environments puzzled me then spurned me on to go explore the spaces they choose to be and understand the foundations for a making that is outside Black Art Fairs. I went to Art School. At first I completed a summer certificate at an Art School which seemed like an impossible luxury at the time. I used my entire earnings from the last black art fair that I attended to pay for the summer school. Little did I know that i would go on to get a scholarship and then pay in so much more money than this to go on to get a full MFA in Studio Practice. Some of the Artists that blew my mind:
William Pope L,
Clifford Owens.
When I was in my MFA it was wonderful to meet so many artists that made me feel like making art was unquestionably a worthwhile and valuable thing to do. This was not a given for me. These works helped me to think about articulating my practice in terms of furniture and surface. Mentorship from Sanford Biggers made me think in terms of a bigger practice. I became a mother for the second time during my MFA almost loosing the child in the first year. I was overwhelmed with the work involved in raising two young children. During the MFA my practice developed and I became clearer about what I wanted to explore and why. My readings lead me to consider how it is that our society depends on unpaid unrecognized labour in order for paid recognized labour to have a privileged possible place. How there are people underneath it all holding this structure up not entirely visible but absolutely necessary everyday way. I felt that it say almost as if these people were functioning like furniture. I knew of an image that presented this structure in a political way, but found it left me cold and was altogether too diagrammatic and formulaic.
I looked at the work of Alen Jones
and Pharell Williams
but as I felt they were articulating something else. It helped me to feel that what I wanted to say was worthwhile and necessary. I made this :
Of course there are many other artists that continue to feed into my practice. I will talk about them another time. I remain thankful to all the structures of the art world and all the people who are in and outside of these structures for their influence. I continue to work with soft and hard interior furnishings, just recently in conversation I had to wonder what would happen to my practice if I was let out of the house (so to speak)?.........
