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Post colonial artists

Jacky Puzey
'Postcolonial Dream coats'
Visual Arts Programme - Black History Month - Identity

Held at Oh! Arts, Oxford House in Bethnal Green, Derbyshire St, Bethnal Green, London E2 6HG, at the Black History Month show from Friday 1 October - Sunday 31 October 2004

You are invited to see this exhibition at Ceredigion Museum and Art Gallery, Aberystwyth, as part of a group show called 'Dare to Wear', running from November 12 to January 15 2005. Follow this link for Directions and opening hours for the museum. The opening night, is November 12 from 7.30pm.

This work can also be seen at http://sionhillmods.org, as part of the MA show at Bath Spa University College. The artist can be contacted directly on 0117 935 5717 or at 7 Cartledge Road, Easton, Bristol, BS5 6ES.

Postcolonial Dream-coats - exhibition notes

My practice as an artist revolves around making costumes for experience and memory, for site specific locations and constructed scenarios. The "Postcolonial Dreamcoats" encompass a layering of history and experience within their tailoring and detail, which is also crucial to their siting. They start from the subversion of ceremonial robes, embroidered not only with symbols of power and wealth but with cycles of complicity and exchange, interwoven histories that ignite into contested histories through economic power and disempowerment. They use their presence within specific locations to go back and forward within the histories and traditions that they contain, creating a situation that requires dialogue rather than prejudice, questioning the processes of acquisition and indeed assimilation that are part of any cultural exchange.

Background

This piece of work seeks to explore the idea of cultural mythmaking, represented both through actual costume and the souvenirs I had collected, both objects and stories, from all the traveling I did with my family as a child and later. My aim was to look at the way in which souvenirs and memories acquire significance as a mirror of the experience of traveling to a place, and also then the ways in which this provides a different or fictional representation of the place visited. For example, for me the memories of explorer, traveller, trader, inhabitant, visitor or even coloniser are all invariably tinged with these personal identities, yet there are distinct crossovers - in my own experience of visiting countries such as Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Kenya and Panama, the research for this project has shown me that the international finance routes we followed for my fathers work in an overseas bank are the same ones set up during the slave trade, which in turn were the combination of the routes European traders traced to America looking for an alternative route to the "Spice Islands" , and into sub-saharan Africa following the stories of the North African and Muslim traders of late mediaeval times. Among the white expatriate community, I met many of those that might be seen as relics of old "Raj" political and power structures, still fully functioning within supposedly postcolonial times via the same old trade routes and motivations. For myself I found a new perspective on the way in which "expatriate" and "local" communities, despite the expats often identifying themselves as "opposite" , are in fact a much more complex set of interrelations built on trade and exchange and settlement, as well as historical conflict and inequality. The expat "old East Africa hand" Brit can no more return to their idea of home than those seeking roots in Freetown (originally founded as a "home" settlement for freed slaves in Sierra Leone, West Africa) can be said to have found theirs.

This is thrown into sharp relief given my own location now living in Easton, a predominantly immigrant area of Bristol since the 1850"s, where the leading business is run by an East African Asian family kicked out of Uganda by Idi Amin in the early 1970s. In turn, Sir John Easton, who may or may not have given his name to Easton, was a Bristol merchant in a city built in many parts on the wealth of its participation in the transatlantic slave trade. But, Bristol also contained many pro-abolition reformers and actions, such as the refusal of liberal middle class women to use sugar in their tea, boycotting this contested trade item as a symbol of their support for the abolition of slavery. Bristol's current involvement with military aerospace projects, some linked to old colonial and now Commonwealth countries, is a contemporary manifestation of cycles of economic and political power dominance within trading situations. Then, one of the Easton Community Centre's permaculture gardeners also runs irrigation and organic projects in Africa and was at one point an advisor to fledgling trades union activists in Tanzania.

This personal take is what motivated me in my design of my costumes, using my own memories and experiences in conjunction with textile histories, and my experience of making large scale Caribbean carnival costumes, to try and find a way of exploring loaded issues without making assumptions or sweeping statements. Like the Carnival tradition, these costumes are both a source of history and tradition, and at the same time they turn these on their head, so that the Dr Living in Stone costume pokes fun at fossilized Empire-nostalgic white expatriates, "Dr Livingstone I presume?", but is also embroidered with current trade histories and goods, like a historical West African warrior costume covered in talismans, except that these talismans are "protections" for economic realities. The African Queen Hepburn starts from Katharine Hepburn as the white lady missionary in John Huston"s film "the African Queen", but exudes a powerful matriarchal femininity, combining tailoring reminiscent of an Empire era white governors" wife with bright souvenir textiles and the tourist postcard images of African women, heavily beaded and fabric draped, that are a part of a contemporary "Mama Benz" image of successful (hence Mercedes Benz driving) African women fabric traders.

The Costumes

The work comprises two costume sculptures, one male approx. 2.5m high, provisionally titled Dr Living In Stone and one female approx. 3m high, provisionally titled The African Queen Hepburn . They also come with their own carpet of trade goods, an Axminster made of trade goods, chocolate and coffee, of harsh economic realities and stolen diamonds. Their costumes at first glance seem to contain many recognizably iconic images of colonial and tourist experiences of Africa, yet these are interwoven with traditional African textile techniques, English textiles and several nods to Victorian tailoring, and embroidered with stories, souvenirs and postcard images of personal experiences. In a sense they are fake national costumes for a preconceived historical, part British Empire, perhaps African, ceremony that draws on existing historical situations to explore actual experience, memory and situational politics.

I deliberately set out to try and make these costumes so that they were more like carnival representations of nationalistic costumes, self aware and always questioning. While they are positioned in similar stances to many images of say, "the British governor and his lady wife greeting the local people", their costumes are already embroidered with their preconceptions, the explorer's vision of the empty african plains on the mans suit or the bright brash tourist images of flamingos on the lady's sarong; but then these are also deliberately juxtaposed with references to the vitality possible within trading and cultural relationships, so that for example the sarong might have Katharine Hepburn in "The African Queen" on it, but also has a contemporary image from a memory of a black Kenyan businesswoman I met in Mombassa who ran a large and successful fabric business between Germany and Kenya. The spats on the male costume drawing are just as much a reference to the sharp dressed black culture in Harlem, New York in the 1920s and 30's as to the inherent unsuitability of much white British Victorian era garb for tropical climes. The combination of spats and pith helmet also becomes an example of dressing up to pass, by adopting either the smartest styles or the most practical to adapt into, or stand out in, another location and culture. I am interested both in the whole idea of clothing as signifier of authenticity of tradition, for example within traditional historically orientated displays, and clothing as the ultimate personal statement of history and experience, such as in elaborate carnival and masquerade costumes.

The costumes also contain a soundtrack of memories, songs, histories and discussions, which murmurs quietly inside them as if they would tell another story to the audience, reading themselves and responding to old memories and different ideas.

Please follow this link for photographs of the artwork

with many thanks to Folake Shoga