Sustaining a Weight
A body of work developed through a research residency at the British School at Rome, centring around the motif of the blackamoor in Baroque Italian furniture design.
Often carved from exotic woods, ebonised, painted and gilded; these objects feature Black figures positioned in functional gestures of servitude – kneeling or bent double to support a cabinet or table top, standing to attention holding a cushion or tray to receive the gloves of visitors, holding aloft lamps, or sprouting candle fixings and vases from turbaned heads.
The research considers the objects alongside classical Western architectural motifs of atlantes and caryatides. The work considers ideas of punishment and silencing that are embedded into acts of petrification and gestures of burden-bearing; and that in turn have informed further representations of the defeated, the oppressed, and the 'other'.
