Leonora Carrington
I have mentioned Leonora Carrington before, but while I was in Venice in July 2022, I was able to see more of her work at the Biennale and the Guggenheim Collection. I was drawn to her anthropomorphic figures and the atmosphere in her paintings. The figures helped me to recall my own propensity to draw hybrids.
Dorothea Tanning
I found Dorothea Tanning's work in the same exhibits. Particularly, I was moved by her painting, 'The Magic Flower Game' which seems to capture a moment of agency before transformation. It was powerful in a quiet way that made me think about all the internal metamorphoses we go through. I attempted to capture this sense in the video I made.
Paula Rego
Several of Paula Rego's larger pastel works were shown at the Biennale in Venice. I was struck by the way Rego portrayed women in different stages and situations – all of them silently telling a story. Their faces became irrelevant – their expressions and their roles stood out. I thought that all of those women in the works could have been one woman, and I suspect they were.
Robert Heinecken
Heinecken's work 'Venus Mirrored' (1968) is a photo sculpture made with negatives layered inside glass. I was visually inspired by this work and the idea of layered bodies it presented. It suggested that if you look closely, there are several people inside one body.
Ian Craib
Ian Craib's book 'Experiencing Identity' (Sage, 1998) helped me to consolidate my ideas. Particularly his idea of "endless self-creation" and our agency in shaping them and its limits. He writes, "...it is important to consider under what conditions one might be able to prescribe, erase and rewrite one's identity... Once I am seen my ability to revise my identity is limited: I cannot become a blonde teenage girl or a man who is 120 years old".
Conversations
One of the things that go largely unacknowledged when talking about research is informal personal conversations. Yet, most often I have found that these conversations have brought quite a lot of insight for me because they allow us to seamlessly connect our lived experiences with how we make sense of them using a variety of critical tools available to us. Conversations I have had with the following artists and friends have been pivotal to making this piece and it is their voices in addition to mine that you hear in 'There are so many here I don't know how we will ever get along'.
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Anja Dimitrijević
I met Anja in Venice as part of the Venice Fellowship Programme. She is a performance artist originally from Belgrade, who has been working with identities and borders. She uses her family history and her own experience trying to gain citizenship in Italy to inform her work.
Taraneh Dana
Taraneh studies MA Painting at Camberwell, though recently she has been making objects with ceramics. These objects are very poetic. They hold the shapes that materially articulate her feelings and experiences.
Alia Sinha
I have known Alia for more than a decade and we have fumbled together to find our way as artists. Yet, for years before that, we have sat ourselves down with hot beverages and tried to frame our lived experiences against whatever critical theory we were interested in at the moment. Alia is an illustrator and she makes savagely accurate but warm drawings of our lives.