Artist Corrina Eastwood reflects on her talk at the Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting - February 2015

Corrina Eastwood and fellow artist Delaine Le Bas kindly agreed to talk about their art practices in relation to British identities at the Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting in February. The meeting is a forum for researchers, artists, academics, curators, students and activists to introduce an aspect of their art practice, research, cultural activism. 

Corrina brought her experience of bridging two worlds. She has a Romany Gypsy father yet was raised in a house and sought different educational paths than is usual within the community. Corrina has just started to explore this through the making of a documentary film with Gavin Round.

Both Corrina and Delaine have offered their reflections on what it meant to them to share their thoughts with the group. Recordings of the event are available here and a project bibliography based on the Library's holdings can be downloaded here  (Delaine's thoughts on her talk in this blog)

Still from The Baby and The Snake (2015) by Corrina Eastwood and Gavin Round. ©

Corrina Eastwood on her talk at the Stuart Hall Library Research Network

I was honoured to be asked by Iniva's Stuart Hall Library to team up with artist Delaine Le Bas to present some of my artistic practice with reference to issues surrounding English Romani Gypsy identity.

In retrospect the evening has been an important catalyst in a specific kind of development in my creative process and thinking. This in terms of an exploration and negotiation of proximity of the self and subject when creating a narrative that is both personal and potentially political.

I feel in many ways that the work that Delaine and I both presented created an interesting and challenging contrast as a departure point for discussion.

The work in progress that I presented was 9 minutes of a documentary film that I am directing and collaborating on with my husband Gavin Round. My father is a Romani Gypsy and we started filming my family with a view to focusing on archetypal story telling in Romani Gypsy culture. For me the presentation and following Q & A really clarified my thinking behind this chosen focus. Addressing the issue of this part of my identity is something I have not approached as of yet in my practice and the personal nature of this exploration was something I had in many ways avoided.

Working with Delaine and thinking with others as part of the evening created for me what felt like a tension in my creative process mirrored in the group discussion. Where do I locate myself in this story, what about this story is mine and what parts of the multi faceted nature of identity and the archiving of history do I wish to consider?

The use of documentary film chosen as a medium for this exploration has also been an aspect of my practice that I have been able to consider in greater detail since the evening at Iniva. The explicit nature of film lends to a sense of moving beyond the anecdotal in terms of archiving, yet a use of metaphor and a particular aesthetic has proven to expose the subject to interpretation I had yet to consider before this being highlighted in group discussion.

Still from The Baby and The Snake (2015) by Corrina Eastwood and Gavin Round. ©

In conclusion, I have found the tensions and deliberation evident between the conveying of the stories of individuals through artistic means, and this being with in a context of culture, interesting and surprising.

Finding a balance within my practice so that the stories of individuals are not lost but are privileged within a wider political context has become a focus for further consideration.  

I have also been inspired by Delaine and other artists met through the evening and look forward to future collaborations further exploring personal stories of identity. 

Corrina Eastwood 2015
 

Artist Delaine Le Bas on SAY NO TO IDENTITY THEFT presentation at the Stuart Hall Library 12 February 2015

The artist Delaine Le Bas is an English Romani Gypsy. Delaine has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, she was an advisor and one of the sixteen artists who were part of The First Roma Pavilion Paradise Lost, 52nd Venice Biennale 2007. 

Delaine and fellow artist Corrina Eastwood kindly agreed to talk about their art practices in relation to their identities at the Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting in February. The meeting is a forum for researchers, artists, academics, curators, students and activists to introduce an aspect of their art practice, research, cultural activism.

Both Delaine and Corrina have offered their reflections on what it meant to them to share their thoughts with the group. Recordings of the event are available here and a project bibliography based on the Library's holdings can be downloaded here  (Corrina's thoughts on her talk in this blog )

Delaine Le Bas on her presentation at Stuart Hall Library Research Network

Archive material donated by Delaine Le Bas to the Stuart Hall Library

Stuart Hall has been a major figure in my life so to be able to present Say No To Identity Theft at Iniva’s Stuart Hall library was I feel personally a great privilege made even more poignant by the fact that it was exactly a year since his death, this held particular resonance for me.

The Stuart Hall Project has been influential in its impact upon how I feel about who I am, how to question the ideas put forward by institutional and academic 'othering' as to who and what I should be.

Archive material donated by Delaine Le Bas to the Stuart Hall Library

I hope that the presentation that I made had some sense of the impact and power that I feel the work of Stuart Hall has had upon myself and many others in claiming our own identity and not being afraid to question the history and identities that have for generations been forced upon us.
Delaine Le Bas 2015

Archive material donated by Delaine Le Bas to the Stuart Hall Library

Yinka Shonibare and the William Morris Family Album

William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow

Exhibition review by Dr Christine Checinska

Yinka Shonibare MBE, 'The William Morris Family Album', 2015, Copyright the artist, Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, Commissioned by William Morris Gallery

Yinka Shonibare has recently said about his work …

I am very interested in identity, in history and understanding why things are the way that they are today, and there is always a reason for that… For example how do you begin to understand multicultural Britain now, what brought that about, why all these people are here – what is the history of that? That is the history of colonialism. There is no getting away from the past, unfortunately, because the past is always present.[1]

This notion of the past being ever present – cutting into, interrupting and informing the everyday – is explored further in the current William Morris Gallery (WMG) exhibition: the William Morris Family Album. This show is in fact the gallery’s first major commission. Shonibare characteristically examines the legacy of Empire and the global textile trade by restaging photographs from the Morris family album using local Walthamstow residents as his sitters. In this context Shonibare’s use of Dutch wax cotton takes on intriguing new meanings.

The Dutch wax print cloth that features in much of Shonibare’s work is a metaphor for the interrelationship between Britain and Africa and voices the complexity of black British identity. As with much of Shonibare’s work, there is something very seductive about these works. The heady use of colour and pattern and the sensual use of texture are almost hypnotic. The viewer is immediately drawn into Shonibare’s make believe world, but it is only then, on closer inspection of each, that his sophisticated use of semiotics and layers of suggested meaning gradually becomes more apparent. The mixture of and tension between an aesthetic quality that is pleasurable and seductive to the eye, and the layer upon layer of hidden meaning is arresting. Entering into his world, the viewer is forced to inhabit the space between repulsion and desire that is the colonial gaze; the work troubles the “colonised mind” and in so doing, Shonibare’s central themes and questions come artfully into play. I am deliberately inserting the term “artfully”, since, for me, there is always a level of wit and mischief making in Shonibare’s work. There is an aura of irony and satire, together with the obvious mastery of his art. At first reading these works seem playful and harmless, but then, when read more closely carries troubling messages and uneasy questions.

Shonibare’s use of metaphors of African textiles against metaphors of quintessential Englishness, i.e. the Victorian family album with its references to home, to the Victorian parlour with its associations of Empire, the Victorian era itself often viewed through nostalgic eyes as a time when Britain was truly “great”, gives rise to a characteristic level of complexity. The Victorian era was also the era of the anthropological ethnographic museum, e.g. Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum opened in 1883, adding a further layer of questions and possible meanings; Shonibare takes the idea of the “cabinet of curiosities”, stretching and subverting it, reversing it, almost as if to suggest that anthropology itself is about invention rather than discovery – he questions the “writing” of one culture by another. The recurring themes of the fusion of the diametrically opposed, questions of authenticity and perception, identity and difference/self and other, Empire and the resulting interconnecting histories are all alive in this new work. Yet read against what we know of William Morris’ socialist politics, new questions about equality today arise; class, culture and race collide. Equally when we consider the current gentrification of Walthamstow in London, it’s morphing into trendy ‘Awesomestow’, additional questions around these issues come to the fore. But what is also of interest to me is the way in which the politics of Morris and Shonibare at times overlap:

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make. William Morris

Similarly, Shonibare himself in an in-conversation at the WMG spoke of his respect for Morris’ politics. He also made reference to their mutual love of the decorative.

The use of so-called African textiles is the lynchpin of Shonibare’s sophisticated use of signs and symbols … but these textiles, these brightly coloured easy to spot cloths are not African at all and even if they were how could they possibly represent an entire continent? These vibrant prints are often referred to as Dutch wax cottons or Dutch wax-resist prints. As Jessica Hemmings writes:

The transnational identity of wax-resist textiles emerges from the numerous cultures that have in the past, and continue today, to identify with wax-resist…During Dutch colonization of [Indonesia] batik production was taken up in the Netherlands … but the market proved unsuccessful… Instead the textiles found a welcome reception in West Africa, becoming symbols of national pride associated with independence gained by a number of nations in the late 1950s and 1960s.[2]

Rooted in meticulous historical research, Shonibare’s ‘principled clash of colour and pattern’, rather than celebrating identities framed by cultural and racial difference, celebrates hybrid cultural identities that are continually in flux. He uses familiar signifiers of African-ness and Englishness, subverting them in order to deconstruct our understanding and acceptance of them. The Dutch wax print cloth is a metaphor for the interrelationship between Britain and Africa: the complexity of so-called black British identity. In this instance Shonibare’s choice of colour on the prints is reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelite colour palette; a subtle reference to a certain notions of Englishness.

Shonibare’s William Morris Family Album, though difficult to summarize in a few words, highlights questions about authenticity and purity, whilst the rending of metaphorical borders between the self and the other/us and them/colonizer and colonized, through the use of “African” cloth, and a post-structuralist concern with the polysemic nature of non-verbal signs, through playing havoc and making mischief with seemingly recognisable visual codes.

Copyright Dr Christine Checinska 9/3/15

[1] Shonibare, Museums Journal, June 2013, p. 41.

[2] Hemmings, Cultural Threads (Bloomsbury Publications)

Audio recordings of Raju Rage and Raisa Kabir at February Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group

 'Cloth on the Queer Brown Body' Raisa Kabir photo. of Raju Rage

Our Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group meeting in February featured a collaboration between two young artists, Raisa Kabir and Raju Rage. They described how they use their art and textile practices to address gendered South Asian queer identity and the meanings of cotton cloth on the brown queer body. Raisa Kabir brought along examples of her woven textiles and Raju Rage dressed in a sari printed with archival photographs.

The artists worked together on the project "There is More at Stake Than Just 3 Metres of Cloth" which represents the migrations of South Asians from North India/ Panjab to East Africa to Britain and the symbolism encoded within the turban. Sociologist Nirmal Puwar offered her thoughts and questions followed by comments from the intrigued audience.

Read more about the participants on the webpage and an audio recording of the event is available below.