Composure
2022 - ongoing
Composure is an ongoing series that utilises combinations of collage, drawing and object-making to consider perspectival notions of interiority and aesthetics. It is centred around found archival imagery which document black presence in African interior settings between the 1950s and 70s, a period chosen for analysis due to its often liberatory associations as a significant moment in which many African countries gained independence from colonial rule. Each work engages with a singular image which goes through an intricate process involving the extraction of experiential information, followed by a recomposition in relation with personal or/and resonant source material.
The work draws ties between histories in the construction of linear perspectival depictions of space and the racialised aesthetic foundations of modernity, further questioning representational formalisms within the discipline of architecture, and the ways in which we are taught and encouraged to “see.” It brings into interrogation the over-rationalisation of perspective insofar as when renderings of space elevated to become mathematically calculable, and in considering complex relationships between blackness and aesthetics, Composure specifically contemplates how subjective optical impressions have been abstracted, therefore causing interference with structures of psychophysiological space and inhabitations.
Rather than perceiving this issue of perspective only as a limitation, its constraint becomes a condition of possibility. Through employing diagrammatic and choreographic methods by way of tools in architectural drawing, the works become representations of space in motion through lines of movement and interaction between characters, objects and environment. This results in an experiential vocabulary that includes perspective, as well as navigation and re/de/construction as key themes which attend to black spatiality and the politics of place, whereby symbolism is an atmospheric quality working with aesthetic logic and form to impart reflection on blackness and metaphysical challenges.
The series speaks to the politics of the gaze, as pointedly, whether in action, idle or posing, the found images depict people whose focus is not directed towards the camera however this is, at times, contrasted with a personal confrontation of the lens, raising questions around autonomy and performance. Further, Composure considers the distance that perspective creates between humans beings and things, but carefully disregards its stable and mathematically exact rules to instead create room for the work to be contingent upon the viewer’s individual visual impression. In recomposing the archival images, perspective is no longer solely about precise calculation but becomes about style.
There is an underlying understanding of western culture’s dominant development of an ocular-centric paradigm and its inability to contain all that space is within its school of thought. In play, reimagining, remixing and improvising the pictorial scene allows for shifts in interpretation. Here, vision is regarded as an extension of the sense of touch, and techniques in scale, pattern, layering provide a peripheral stimuli, inviting participation in roaming these not-quite locations. But there is no hesitation towards this contradiction, it is movement within the work and its lack of fixity that embraces the ineffable. Composure is interested in the gaps between bodies and non-bodies, subject and object, and through devoted observation attempts to blur these gaps whilst fully recognising all that is depicted within the surface of the page signifies more than its consolidation of people and things, reaching out in all directions beyond represented space. It is the boundary of the surface edges that make present and perceptible a sense of continuity in these imagined environments.
2022 - ongoing
Mixed media collage on paper
All works 30 x 59.4 cm
Composure is an ongoing series that utilises combinations of collage, drawing and object-making to consider perspectival notions of interiority and aesthetics. It is centred around found archival imagery which document black presence in African interior settings between the 1950s and 70s, a period chosen for analysis due to its often liberatory associations as a significant moment in which many African countries gained independence from colonial rule. Each work engages with a singular image which goes through an intricate process involving the extraction of experiential information, followed by a recomposition in relation with personal or/and resonant source material.
The work draws ties between histories in the construction of linear perspectival depictions of space and the racialised aesthetic foundations of modernity, further questioning representational formalisms within the discipline of architecture, and the ways in which we are taught and encouraged to “see.” It brings into interrogation the over-rationalisation of perspective insofar as when renderings of space elevated to become mathematically calculable, and in considering complex relationships between blackness and aesthetics, Composure specifically contemplates how subjective optical impressions have been abstracted, therefore causing interference with structures of psychophysiological space and inhabitations.
Rather than perceiving this issue of perspective only as a limitation, its constraint becomes a condition of possibility. Through employing diagrammatic and choreographic methods by way of tools in architectural drawing, the works become representations of space in motion through lines of movement and interaction between characters, objects and environment. This results in an experiential vocabulary that includes perspective, as well as navigation and re/de/construction as key themes which attend to black spatiality and the politics of place, whereby symbolism is an atmospheric quality working with aesthetic logic and form to impart reflection on blackness and metaphysical challenges.
The series speaks to the politics of the gaze, as pointedly, whether in action, idle or posing, the found images depict people whose focus is not directed towards the camera however this is, at times, contrasted with a personal confrontation of the lens, raising questions around autonomy and performance. Further, Composure considers the distance that perspective creates between humans beings and things, but carefully disregards its stable and mathematically exact rules to instead create room for the work to be contingent upon the viewer’s individual visual impression. In recomposing the archival images, perspective is no longer solely about precise calculation but becomes about style.
There is an underlying understanding of western culture’s dominant development of an ocular-centric paradigm and its inability to contain all that space is within its school of thought. In play, reimagining, remixing and improvising the pictorial scene allows for shifts in interpretation. Here, vision is regarded as an extension of the sense of touch, and techniques in scale, pattern, layering provide a peripheral stimuli, inviting participation in roaming these not-quite locations. But there is no hesitation towards this contradiction, it is movement within the work and its lack of fixity that embraces the ineffable. Composure is interested in the gaps between bodies and non-bodies, subject and object, and through devoted observation attempts to blur these gaps whilst fully recognising all that is depicted within the surface of the page signifies more than its consolidation of people and things, reaching out in all directions beyond represented space. It is the boundary of the surface edges that make present and perceptible a sense of continuity in these imagined environments.