MADWOMAN?!
What care is taken by people with agency, and what care must be taken for those without? What language do we use when our daily lives consist of unspeakable acts?
Madwoman?! investigates the intimate lives of unknowable women.
With reference to Agnes Richter’s jacket, Paris’ collages feminicides, white feminism and the inherited autonomy of nameplate necklaces, the work explores personal and intergenerational and struggles with motherhood and sisterhood in Germany, the UK and Trinidad & Tobago.
Using the idea of a school uniform to explore clothing’s potential to regulate bodies, these textile and paper works play with the trust inherent to performance and spectatorship; the breaking of this trust underlines gendered violence in public and private space.
NB: In this work ‘woman’ is used as a term for feminised, subjugated persons.
Ting to put in House
Ting to put in House, 2022-2024 Gold-plated silver, Coloured pencil, highlighter pencil on architectural paper.
“Ting to put in house” is a Trinidad&Tobago label of approval of a person’s potential as a domestic partner. Usually this means that not only wouldn’t they object to being objectified, but that they’re great at cooking and cleaning; at maintaining a house and household.
I started these drawings on long scrolls of architectural paper by copying the outlines of building plans for the institutions that have guided my life - schools, universities, immigration offices and hospitals. None of these were homes but they were the safest houses I’ve known.
In these drawings, I also copied the dress patterns of the jumpsuits that I’d had custom-made for myself and three other collaborators. Then I copied those copies from memory, then those copies of copies, etc. After 25m of paper, the drawings looked like this.
For the install at Ruby Cruel, I seeded them with nameplate pendants for the girls who’d run admin for me while I was in or trying to get into these places. Friendships with these women soured when I got healthy, got a powerful passport, and finally started working on my career. This was the most illustrative case of white feminism being dependent on my being a body that could be pitied and saved but never ever allowed dignity or sovereignty. It’s also why I’m having this show in Britain and not in Germany.
Marigolds
Marigolds, 2024 Gold-Flecked Wenzhou paper, gold embroidery thread, mother of pearl.
Takeaways for visitors, the Marigolds could also be offered at a feminicide collage in the garden.
The Soldier who: Collage Feminicide
"Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just beginning to get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was telling—as though it were a light and amusing subject—how a neighbor’s wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know that he wasn’t trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for her fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand…. "
- Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (my emphasis)