This is the basis of a talk I gave at the Pethe Platfform 2 July 2022 event, part of a Peak Cymru series https://www.peakcymru.org/events, in conversation with co-founders of LUMIN Press, artists Sadia Pineda Hameed and Beau W Beakhouse, and audience.
You can watch the montage I created to accompany the talk on YouTube. Here is the link https://youtu.be/PTPI6Q19apE
I am a multidisciplinary artist. I have until recently been more literary and audio based, and used to working to help facilitate the arts practice of others through community work. And I am now developing my own artistic practice, in combining text, digital, visual and audio mediums. I have been on a hiatus from creating since moving to the UK. Artists take spontaneous hiatus. And while we may not be seen to be creating, something is brewing in the space that is our invisible chalice.
The roots of my relationship to the arts are in
- early childhood
- life in Goderich
- rural community
- town and city life
- community radio
- UK life
With the invitation to take part in this talk I sat down to write something about my creative process. Being part of the Interlude Mentoring program last summer, and the PEAK Cymru Casgleb/Pegwn project this year, I have been engaging in conversations about artistic practice as I find my way in this present, this space and time.
Participation in Interlude, Pegwn/Casgleb and the LUMIN Solstice radio broadcast has led to a creative explosion in my mind. As though I have been holding a whole world inside. And my world is shifting as I figure out how to develop a physical space to develop my creative ideas. As I regained access to a language I had put away.
And, it's not just about physical space, it's also about time in space. It's also about the use of language, our relationship to language and the intersections of culture, language and histories of oppression and colonialism, and decolonization.
Most immediately I am doodling and experimenting with digital tools, and I am working on my first book of poetry, immediately means over a period of years as I steal time to write between jobs providing web design, virtual admin and social media support for others.
The book is inspired by places where I have lived and where I exist now. The landscape speaks to me and grounds me -- the inner landscape and the outer landscape and the connections between them. My family history figures in the writing and is woven in the work as I continue -- as the work develops, I will follow ideas around my family history, incorporating some facts and hidden truths from the past. For example unravelling the impact of domestic abuse entwined with the stresses resulting from racism, sexism, gender issues and class realities. Also the silence around health challenges and the recognition that we are a neurodivergent family.
ckln radio / Level 37
While preparing for the Level 37 broadcast for Solstice broadcast organized by LUMIN Press (You can find the archive of the some of the varied Level 37 programming featuring a range of spokenword and music programming here https://www.mixcloud.com/LuminRadio/local-37-part-1-with-gantala-press/ ), the programming really took me back to the energy of ckln times. I began remembering the ways that I used to prepare for my radio shows at ckln, a community space that existed in Toronto, Ontario Canada that I was lucky enough to become a part of. I called the Level 37 show The Adventures of Rip Van Winklette in the 21st century, because in putting the program together, I felt as though I was waking from deep sleep as I dug through the bowels of my computer’s memory to find recordings of interviews and music from my previous life as a ckln radio programmer in Toronto. ckln is where I was first able to experiment and learn how to create a different kind of radio. So preparing for the segment was familiar yet unfamiliar. I recalled how I used to carry a walkman everywhere with me. When I heard snippets of conversations that interested me, I would introduce myself to strangers and ask them to allow me to record some of the conversation and get them to give me permission on the tape so I could air snippets between songs on the show.
I recorded the sounds of the streets, the beach, sounds of the city, again, to have ambient snippets to play between tracks. My show was a place that artists of all disciplines could drop by and have a chat impromptu on air, started creating my own idea of what an inclusive radio station could be like.
ckln was a doorway to the arts. As ckln was in one of the biggest radio markets in the world I figured that, as a DJ there, I was also a freelance journalist and asked the station manager to allow me to make myself a press pass, which I created and had laminated so I could attend events that I would review for my music show. I figured other people could read news and sports between the music tracks they played but I would interview artists and musicians and fashion designers and filmmakers. And off I went!
ckln’s statement of principles guided a diverse group of volunteer programmers in aiming to produce content that from inception was antiracist and nondiscrimantory regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or a variety of belief systems. This was the place that allowed me to evolve a critical consciousness when I would share readings on air from the speeches of Malcolm X, the biographies of Angela Davis and Malcolm, the writings of bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, interspersed with readings of poetry, my own and others. Time at ckln expanded my understanding of community and my awareness of divergent ideas around race, gender, sexuality and class. It brought me in direct contact with communities which led to my participation in activities like helping to establish a Black artist network across Canada. My show was my canvas and my studio was the world as I saw it.
My artistic practice is very influenced by childhood experience. I have pre-verbal memories of my early life in Jamaica - the memories are snippets of scenes of life with my family rich in colour, sounds, the people, landscape and seascape. Then memories of growing up in rural Canada - the sound of Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes, and the Maitland River, the sounds of cattle in the neighbours field, the rustling corn fields on the other side of our home, but also the sounds of the reality at home, listening for the sound in my dads voice that signalled a violent episode was coming. At 15 I tried to transform the experience of violence in our household. My creative impulse was expressed in the making of a rather large rock garden in the shape of a heart that is still visible today from the sky. (Close Encounters reference) I was a slender and not strong teen but I carried granite rocks from around the land to build this. It can be found on Google earth if you have the coordinates. It was a response to the domestic violence in my household. The garden sat right outside my window so I could look at it when I needed it. A rock totem of sorts
That memory definitely affected my parenting where I determined not to allow domestic violence to impact my children's early life. Instead encouraging creative expression with lots of art tools available all around the house.
Stories from my parents, I learned that Jamaicans, Caribbean people listened to all kinds of music from European classical to country and rnb, not only calypso and reggae. Imagine my surprise at the outside world when I moved to the city and realized that supposedly black people were only ever all about reggae music. From my dark skinned black Jamaican mother I got my love of ska and a love of flamboyant stylish clothing and movement through the dance, the energy of which remained with me even though I am also a metal head from my years growing up in Goderich as a Canadian teen. From my white Canadian stepmum I developed a love of literature, art, and rockabilly music. She also taught me to make lace and preserves, my own yogurt and granola weekly, and the joy of bulk buying. Her grandmother had left a legacy, never letting my stepmum's mother forget that there could always be another depression. So, be prepared.
My father introduced us to Shakespeare and Anansi, talked about patois and the importance of Miss Lou (which my siblings and I were not allowed to speak because the ultimate goal/dream he had for our survival and prosperity lay in our mastery of the English language as spoken by Canadians or English people - Wales didn't even figure in that hehe). There were 6 kids in the family and every Christmas we had to choose a Shakespearean play to act out at home. We did all the parts hehe. And through my own reading I found TS Eliot, Sylvia Plath, ee cummings, and a range of early British and American poets, and a love of European fairy tales. It is possible that I wasn't offered the readings of Caribbean writers of the day because of the push to move away from the patois as many Jamaicans of the time were enamoured of the 'Queen's English', although I also understood this to be about wanting to thrive in a world that did not validate our way of speaking. We learned to be fluent in the world's dominant language.
My literary life started, oddly though, with my dad handing me a very thick medical encyclopedia after moving to Canada. I was 5. My first memory of a book is of that thick white leatherbound book. He wanted me to start early on the road to becoming a doctor. He wanted me to become a respectable and wealthy upstanding member of society. His wish was about survival, not only for myself but for the whole black race. I had to memorize this book. So my arts practice was sidelined early, and I kept making things whether through crochet, knitting, cooking, etc. Writing became a secret thing.
Goderich was made up of various communities that stemmed from rural, town, mining, and tourism communities. And the arts were celebrated. You never knew who of the farmers, miners or townspeople might be a theatre person, a painter, musician or writer. I grew up with a sense that it’s quite natural for anyone to be an artist. It kind of balanced the tension with my father's rejection of the arts as a way to make a living in a white world.
My world view is still grounded in the sense of family and community I remembered from Jamaica and a sense of family and community from my childhood in Goderich. Each has a slightly different sensibility in my memory.
This includes experiences of racism in the outside world, the complexities of being part of a racially mixed blended family, and the impact of unpredictable domestic violence within our family home in Ontario. So my mind was quite split trying to make sense of things. Home life was middle class, dominated by an upwardly mobile parent driven to succeed in a white world. We had a library full of art books, my stepmum's influence, lots of national geographic books which I read and learned about art in African and other countries through. the photographs, There were also books containing paintings by old european masters, and lots of novels and oddly early editions of British women's home journals and novels like Lady Chatterly's Lover
And the landscape around Goderich and seascape of Lake Huron and the waters of the Maitland River were balancing for me.
Now I live and work in the Brecon Beacons in Wales, near the book town Hay-on-Wye. On arrival I channelled my creative energy into producing the first Black History Month event in Powys. It made sense to me as I was confident with the experience I had brought from my ckln days that something inspiring could emerge.
I have always been an artist whether working as a DJ, a writer, a photographer but I am not a portrait artist for instance as I will probably take the photo and then manipulate it to look like something else. Imagine my joy to be living in the time of AI and other digital tools that I can play with. I still love the smell and texture of paper and paints and the sound of acoustic instruments, and to be alive in the 21st century I delight in the opportunity to experiment and create in every medium possible. I work in these media because I have a particular interest in surrealism as applies to contemporary life, on the borders and fringes in external and internal landscapes, and our spiritual and emotional worlds.
As a black experimental artist even when I was primarily a Rock DJ, I have always been in the fringe within the fringes. I am inspired by the visual artist Lois Mailou Jones and the wordsmith Langston Hughes because they lived during the Harlem Rennaissance creating original work. I am also inspired by contemporary writers like Lillian Allen, Dionne Brand and Nourbese Philip because of their love of language, creativity and people, combined with a clear dedication to education, women's and human rights, human centred and liberatory social movements, the arts and community.
Currently I am experimenting with digital sketches and drawings, reviewing my past audio interests, experimenting with my voice, recording, cutting up sketches, photos, audio and putting them back together, or seeing what happens if I generate AI images using my originals as the base. As I excavate the photographs I have taken over almost 20 years living in Wales, Ive found a series of silhouettes I have taken of myself. They are important to me as they are about recognizing having always lived and belonged in rural spaces and affirmations to self about being a part of this world with the same rights as anyone else, as anything else on the planet.
The main subject of my work is the landscape of external and inner worlds which is important to me because this seems to be the place I go trying to make sense of the world. My art-making process consists of working currently with a variety of digital apps on my mobile phone and other devices. This is important to understanding my work because I am a digital artist who combines other disciplines or tools with the digital. I am connected to the contemporary critical dialogue of a variety of mediums inspired by the ideas of Isaac Julien and many others. I am also inspired by the idea of combining the audio and visual arts, music and photography because the vibrancy, the potential to expand creativity, offers doorways to spaces to transform a way of looking at the world and of being.
The ideal exhibition space for my work currently is a website because my mobile phone is my current studio space, but the work with Peak Cymru and Interlude has me looking forward to learning and growing and accessing other platforms.
Participating in Casgleb/Pegwn and the Interlude mentoring program has helped me to open myself to possibilities and a vision that is much bigger.
Casgleb/Pegwn time invited me into a conversation about language that coincided with where I am with my own voice and the process of decolonization of thought, voice and language. Of storytelling and sharing as we vision and revisit historical journeys of how we got to where we are now, and how we are moving ahead. The piece Ecosystem is inspired by a series of silhouettes of myself in the garden of the home I lived in for so many years on the mountain above Llanigon. The silhouette represents a generic black person or person of colour who has always been part of the land, of rural areas embedded in the conversation. I respond to the Welsh lilt as I have heard it in Jamaican patois because of the impact of Captain Morgan the son from South Wales way who marked Jamaica with his culture.
The second piece Meditation grew out of the conversation about Cymraeg and explored the relationship, the language whether speakers of Cymraeg or other languages, I became engage in a sort of meditation on bilingualism, multilingual and multicultural community. The path is not always clear, or tidy. There is no precise route and our histories may contain painful memories as we strive to find our way together. In this experience, a sense of overwhelming gratitude for another source of inspiration towards transforming my practice and expanding my understanding and that my work could inhabit larger spaces, and that I have a right to be in the world on my own terms.
