Sustaining a Weight – If Body
A selection of works commissioned by Locales for programme If Body 2023, exhibited at Lateral, Roma in September 2023. Part of a wider body of work on the motif of the blackamoor in Baroque Italian furniture design.
The works embed translated text fragments from Vitruvius’ ‘De Architectura’, that speak of the punitive gesture of rendering sculptural load-bearing figures within architectural design. Riffing on design mood-boards, they employ material processes intended to reference the craft, mimicry, layering, surface, and fakery embedded in many blackamoor sculptures; thinking of these practices in dialogue with constructions of race and othering.
