Drawing Breath

Textiles and works on paper exploring gendered and racialised violence in public and private space. Originally developed as Parade Créole, working with feminist collectives and spaces. Produced during a period of statelessness during which the artist was prohibited from working, living or travelling outside of the city of Kiel.

Textiles and works on paper exploring gendered and racialised violence in public and private space. Originally developed as Parade Créole, working …

MADWOMAN?! at Ruby Cruel

The Madwoman?! works are the latest in the Drawing Breath project, which investigates the intimate lives of unknowable women. Moving on from clothing’s potential to regulate bodies, playing with ideas of performance and spectatorship, I examined gendered violence in public and private space. What care is taken by people with agency, and what care must be taken for those without?

The current phase of this work, which I am exploring during my time at Ruby Cruel, looks at prescriptive language in the institutionalisation and privatisation of memory work, through in-patient care in Germany, the UK and Trinidad & Tobago.

With references to Agnes Richter’s jacket, Paris’ collages feminicides, nameplate necklaces and the languages which mock the subaltern’s pain and protest in Trinidad Calypso, I am wondering if I have become, myself, a woman as unknowable as those before me.

NB: In this work I am using ‘woman’ as a term for feminised, subjugated persons.