Art making as a reconnection with the self 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
Reflecting on my move from curator to artist, and making work as a methodology to dispel the disconnection of institutional practices.
Hello 🌝 I’m back after a seven month hiatus (so much for monthly newsletters, ey?) of begrudgingly dragging myself through to the end of my MA. And I’ve decided to come with a new newsletter altogether. After 18 months of researching and writing about institutional harm, the cycle of reliving past trauma was starting to weigh heavy on me. How can I write a newsletter titled ‘Art Thoughts for a Better World’ when I’m not sure if art truly is a way to get free? So, in order to give more space for my ever-unfurling doubts I bring you Winging it 🤲🏼 💌 🌝 a new monthly-ish newsletter about trying to get by as an artist and writer without a blueprint, and all the neuroses and uncertainties that come with that. With a round-up of what I’ve been reading (books, essays, newsletters etc), viewing (exhibitions) and watching (tv and films) thrown in for good measure. Welcome! So let’s get into it…
Art making as a reconnection with the self 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
I come from a family of artists; although it seems there’s no way to say that without inducing images of the art market and relative celebrity associated with commercially viable art. So maybe it’s fairer to say, I come from a family of artists acquainted with the quieter day to day of making, outside of institutions and capital. My great grandmother was a Latvian painter, my grandma’s preferred medium is glass, and my mum has prioritised a continually changing roundabout of obscure materials over the years. My flat growing up, too, was definitely the home of an artist. Every wall and surface crammed with an array of miscellaneous materials – wire, mannequins, papier maché sculptures, embroidered organs and piles of Observer magazines from 10 years ago – with the distant promise of one day being useful. If you opened a cupboard you might find a glass receptacle filled with hair (my mum’s and my grandma’s, entwined together, in case you’re wondering) or a freezer full of piles of felt (to keep the moths from eating them).
My only true rebellion growing up was to resist any path towards becoming an artist. Formative years of my life were spent being dragged around free exhibition after exhibition in a buggy, being forced to do workshops with other children. When we left the house, it would be to suspicious pleas of ‘Please mum, not another workshop.’ When I was doing art for GCSE and AS Level, my mum would have an art book for every possible subject or new idea. But this was combined with the continual reminder from my teachers that I had no real technical skill; a statement I harboured well into my mid-20s. The final nail in the coffin was a C at the end of my first year of college – not a happy sight for a teenager in continual fear of being reprimanded – and a gushing email from my mum to my art teacher, which we recently rediscovered, begging her to let me drop art as a subject.
So, I never thought I’d be sitting here 10 years later having just made my first piece of public work as an artist. When in mid-2020, I left a curatorial role as a result of institutional racism, I was ready to hang up my boots. Questions were circling my head of what else I could possibly do to make ends meet if I didn’t work in the arts. The problem is, my life has been inextricably tied to the arts since the first curatorial fellowship I did at the age of nineteen in 2016. But after multiple parallel experiences in arts organisations of inhospitability, and a further deterioration in my health, all I wanted to do was lie down and quit.
I have brought in the words of Jemma Desai in this newsletter before, and I’m sure it won’t be the last time her formative research comes up, for Jemma succinctly gives a name to the disconnection we experience as Black and Brown (and disabled) people working in arts institutions.
‘you convince yourself that being disconnected like that from your feelings and bodies might be the way to have more choices, but you don’t know, because no one has told you that your feelings and your bodies give you more.’
Going through experiences of institutional harm commonly leaves you burnt out and disconnected from your body and instincts. In truth, in mid-2020 I had no idea how I would ever get back to myself. All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and hide from the world outside. But around the same time, I received a message from an artist organising an exhibition in Bergen. The artist, Amber Ablett, invited me to be a part of the group show and said I could approach it from a curatorial standpoint, or out of curiosity did I have an artistic practice myself? I don’t know why, something in that one sentence seemed to dispel all the doubts installed in me by childhood art teachers, and gave me permission to think about making work.
For years, I have had a distant pull in my mind, of a desire to uncover the generational relationship between myself and my late father Russell Herman, a South African jazz musician who passed away when I was three. After his death in 1998, my dad was never really spoken about, and the older I’ve become, the bigger and harder it’s felt to approach the grandiosity of unknowing. I felt like the only way to begin pulling at the thread to unravel my ancestry would be to have a buffer – be that writing or something else – between me and an uncovering. Out of Amber’s prompt, and that hidden desire, my first moving image work An Echo For My Father was born.
Between January - April 2021, I largely focused on making An Echo For My Father. I was lucky enough to take up a three month residency at Gasworks, and had unbridled space to explore. Stretching out across months, I was able to honour a slowness of pace and working on crip time, and place curiosity and self-learning at the centre of my endeavours. Having come to associate art with inhospitability, elitism and disingenuity, it was completely foreign to have an antithetical experience to all which had come before. I started to follow invisible lines and connections back to my heritage, and let my instincts lead me. After being so disconnected from myself for so long, could art making be the remedy, a way to reconnect with myself?
Ending with a return to Jemma’s words once more:
‘And I think about other friends and their bodies, and how transition for them is another kind of movement, the journey into a new body over time, a reconnection of the self to the body free from the confines of what we have been taught to accept.’
October updates 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
The biggest news of this month is that An Echo For My Father is finally coming into the world.
🤲🏼 You can view a clip now on 6x6 here, and read a Q&A I did for the occasion here.
🤲🏼 Opening this weekend on 2nd October, I will be in a group exhibition (IRL!!!) curated by Amber Ablett at Hordaland Kunstsenter, ‘That Place of Familiarity That Holds & Hurts’.
🤲🏼 4th - 17th October An Echo For My Father will be available to view online with Obsidian Coast.
🤲🏼 You can still buy one of the special artist edition bookmarks I made with Industria, featuring a still from the film, with proceeds going to support Industria’s vital work.
And some recent writing…
🤲🏼 A written response to Back Inside Ourselves at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival 2021.
🤲🏼 An article on how art and design can be used to improve our mental health, with interviews from Abbas Zahedi, Cynthia Voza Lusilu and Becky Warnock, for Its Nice That.
🤲🏼 An interview with Leah Clements on disability inclusivity for British Journal of Photography.
🤲🏼 The first instalment of my column for Frieze, on Bare Minimum Collective’s organising around sickness, disability, laziness and joy (Instalment number two is coming soon).
🤲🏼 One of my favourite pieces from this year, for Elephant’s This Artwork Changed My Life series, on how Basquiat’s illustrations in Maya Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me taught me to be brave as a toddler.
Currently watching 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
The sardonic and absurd depiction of the wealthy elite boiled down into an intensified environment with the staff of a luxury resort in Hawaii, with very chaotic results, that is The White Lotus. Which actually compelled my boyfriend to turn to me and compliment my taste in TV (a surprise seeing as he’s usually berating me for watching re-runs of Dawsons Creek and One Tree Hill).
Currently reading 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
Otegha Uwugba’s illuminating part-memoir, part social commentary, We Need to Talk About Money which tackles everything from housing to the beauty tax, and elite education. Notable are Otegha’s distinctions between the different relationships people form to money in childhood, particularly in households where scarcity is the norm. Unfortunately, the final few chapters also catalysed a neurotic (and familiar) tailspin about the possibility of my freelance income drying up. But still very worth a read!
Currently viewing 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
I haven’t been going to exhibitions much of late, but the last thing I saw of note was Rene Matić’s nourishing flags for countries that don’t exist but bodies that do at Arcadia Missa. The show is over now, but launched the release of a beautiful (and extensive) photobook, so you can still enjoy the series from the comfort of your sofa. Get your copy here.
See you next time…
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Jamila Prowse is an artist, writer and researcher who works across moving image and textiles to consider methodologies for visualising mixed race identity and the lived experience of disability. She is drawn to stitch making and patchwork as a tactile form of processing complex family histories and mapping disability journeys, and moving image as a site of self-archiving and autoethnography. To find out more about Jamila’s work visit her website. Follow Jamila here.