Recently I’ve diversified my art reading. Ever since I started taking art seriously, around 2001, I’ve been subscribing to a magazine entitled The Artist, recommended to me by somebody who ran a course I attended. As time has gone by I have found it ever more lacking in what I need, and promoting a very narrow view of where painting is at these days. As luck would have it I encountered a concessionary introductory issue to Apollo, and decided to give it a try. A part of this afternoon was spent delving into it, and I am pleased to say that, despite its international art market aspect it is very stimulating.
I was engaged in particular by a piece about the Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare. The first time I encountered his work was when he had an exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture park in 2013, and that certainly made me sit up and take notice. In case you don’t know his material, he is persistently concerned with the exploration of the two sides of his identity–African and British–often using the former as a standpoint from which to interrogate the colonial past. The fact that he uses typically batik printed material (very popular in Africa) as a recurring point of reference, certainly adds distinctiveness to his sculptures.* He is technically innovative, clever and humorous, although he is in danger of becoming a one-trick pony. Having said that, I only wish I had a trick like that!
This afternoon I went out for a walk in the sunshine in the fields not far from our house, overlooking Thornton Dale. (We are permitted a brief period of exercise outside of our homes, despite the currently severe quarantine regulations.) As I walked I was thinking about Shonibare, and the echoes of his concerns in my own recent Wassail! series of drawings. These too are motivated very much by an engagement with compromised identity. I suppose that my own preoccupation might be summed up in the question of whether it is possible, and in what way, to affirm one’s identity as English without apology. What are the sources of imagery on which one might draw while, in particular, avoiding the threat of contamination by notions of Britishness?
Sadly, Gilbert and Sullivan (who supplied the title for this piece) are not a great deal of help.
*This “faces both ways”, in that although it is “read” as typically African, it is actually made in the Netherlands!