Rationalizing the expressive

Although this work is an attempt to trust my own hands and to allow them to do something undetermined – there is a social and cultural context surrounding it. For me this is where the light box comes in, behaving as an analytical frame, whether that be the science of the sociology, psychology or art criticism…

Paying more attention to 'art history', I had a realization - that of appropriation and my freedom to do this as an artist trained on Euro/American art school principles. That said I don't have to follow those principles to the letter, just borrow and cannibalise what I need...

Roni Horn 'Pink tons' 2008

And what of African or Caribbean sensibility or aesthetics one might ask? For me right now - it’s more about black abstracted from these routes, and further black constructed within a western context. It’s not an ideal just an existential project, which I know as my own truth - and thats it… Who knows how it will evolve or end?

Structure/Anti-structure

The drawings became too tight - needed to remedy this some how. I found myself splashing ink around trying to loosen the whole process. Having put the older drawings away I responded to a memory, the new drawings totally exploded…

Untitled black series 2010

I took a step sideways recently… I thought about the futility of trying to construct ‘meaning’ (it was probably one of my darker days). Then I started to concentrate on the splashes, using the unit (spot) in an attempt to construct something out of them.

Untitled Black Series 2010

Currents

In relation to the exhibition, I’m sure you’re wondering about my grand statement. How is it possible to probe blackness as a cultural construct – much less through drawing? On a really basic level, I am trying to develop a more fluid and intuitive process. Something less known and something more discovered – it might seem like a really simple objective, but it’s taken me a long time to get here. In some respects I regard black as an unknown or invisible potential. So there is a loose idea around it, maybe it’s more about a point in time... Like most artists I make stuff because I have to. Naturally it’s linked to the things I’m going through and thinking about.

'In the house of my father' 1996-7 Donald Rodney

I had a recent realisation - I think I’ve been stuck in a time warp. Over the years I’ve been responding to one particular moment… essentially the cultural manifestations of the 80’s and 90’s ‘Black British’ experience. Driven by the political climate, the oppositional was in effect hardwired into the psyche of the black artist. I struggled with that, ultimately I couldn’t get over the degree of collusion that enabled my art school training. It felt like my moral compass was being tested…

I think (like most people) I have a lot of baggage, the struggle in understanding the academic framing of my position, the guilt from my wish to escape from it. Whether I understand it or not, colonial, postcolonial history and theory are amongst the many external forces/currents which envelope and influence my existence.

Inbetween

Untitled Black Series 2009

The show was a really great experience, in more ways than one, but ultimately I got to look back at some older drawings… then a dilemma - I can’t decide whether I’m taking a step sideways or backwards? This thing keeps on oscillating between singular vs multiplicity’, macro vs micro.

Untitled Black Series 2009

Here are some other things I’ve thought about recently:

Cosmology, The unknown

Black as a socio political entity

Jazz original black abstract

Electro music,

Beginnings,

Primal

Primordial soup

Liquid modernity,

Rorschach blots…

Untitled Black Series 2010

Untitled Black

Untitled black series 2009

Was it a ‘New Black’? Some how I knew it was, not a particularly world changing kinda ‘new’ - but on a personal level it felt radical. I didn’t call it 'new' - too grand a statement, ‘Untitled’ seemed to have more scope.

A couple years ago I was introduced to the term Post-Black, coined apparently by Thelma Golden and Glen Ligon. Post-Black attempts to distinguish African-American artists of the present from those of the past. To acknowledge a younger generation with different experiences and consequently a different relationship to African American history.

These African American artists are described as ‘adamant about not being labelled as “black” artists, though their work was steeped… in redefining complex notions of blackness’ Thelma Golden 2001

And there you go that word ‘blackness’ a term, which needs expanding by the admission of that statement. It’s a rather generic term, the nature of which excludes the idiosyncrasies of the individual. This is why I have begun this work I’m interested in exploring my own subjectivity and gestures in relation to this overarching construct...

Rashid Johnson Citizen Band (Explorations in Topology) 2008