Drawing Diaspora - Multiple Exhibitions
- Submitting institution
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York St John University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 479
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- JOYA, Spain
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- December
- Year of first exhibition
- 2019
- URL
-
http://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/4835/
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- A multicomponent practice-based output whose research imperatives have emerged through the artist’s experience as a BAME artist. This project began on a residency in Joya, Spain and has been part funded by St Hugh’s Art foundation which supported the work’s development and exhibition in the Red Gate Gallery, Beijing. Its methodology synthesizes drawing and writing as autoethnography to articulate and interrogate the lived experience of place and displacement. It mobilizes drawing as a process of ‘becoming’ (Bryson, 2003) that documents and inflects being. Its documentation of small spaces/suitcases, kitchen cupboards and bathroom shelves (2017, 2019) viewed through an autoethnographic lens (Ellis and Bochner 2003) enable the artist as researcher to unpack the impact of diasporic life the relationship of home, family, displacement and belonging.
This body of work is indebted to the classic description of diaspora as ‘roots and routes’ (Hall, 1991; Gilroy, 1993). Its practice-led methodology draws on the work of artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Sonia Boyce, who focus on the image of the person, and Yinka Shonibare highlighted the intermingling of African and European culture which have developed Hall and Gilroy’s thinking on ethnicities. Theorists Brubaker (2005) and Alexander (2017) in opposition to Hall and Gilroy, argue that diaspora ‘does not describe the world much but seeks to remake it’ (Brubaker 2005). Drawing Diaspora takes up this assertion to investigate the significance of possessions in the construction of our ‘social selves’ (Burkitt, 2008). We can all become diasporic in objects – because we all have a need and use for domestic possessions Burkitt concluded that before we can become a subject we must become object – this body of work is a manifestation of this. Drawing diaspora offers a much needed, different voice at a time when some voices are more equal than others.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
