Damaged Goods - Another Country
Emotionally and aesthetically, the past is another country. In my work people are in the past, and in a landscape they inhabit, but may not belong to. Like the history of contacts among human beings, they appear displaced. Odd and disturbing juxtapositions are achieved in my work mainly through collaging human figures into landscapes to question the idea that we ‘fit’. I use old photos, mainly from colonial history, and from my own family history. The complex colonial encounters of past and present inspire this work. These encounters are expressed through traces from the past, partly hidden by layers of overlapping imagery. Drawn through a Congo-Belgium, Kenya-Scotland axis, my work combines collage, painting and layering of text and transparent images. I look for wholeness from brokenness, and try to restore some integrity to broken forms through colour and light.
Damaged Goods in English is often used to describe a person who has experienced too much of the emotional trials of life; who has been hurt. The phrase is also a warning; don’t get too close; damage leads to damage. And the past is ‘another country’; so how do we redeem damaged goods, and how can we bring the past close today? Seeing the past in the present, bringing distant people close; this is what inspires my work. Inspired by the historical relations between Europe and Africa, reflected in the scattered history of my own diasporic family, the themes are people and places from Europe and Africa’s past, brought together in an on-going collage.
I hope to fuse meanings and images together, combining elements of cutting, sticking, painting, ink drawings, creating pdf files, and a fusion of layers through light boxes. I seek to make new work of old instants, photos, paintings, fragmented collages. The work is trying to express a desire for closeness with whatever has been damaged by the past; the past which continues today to do its work. Juxtaposing landscapes with people, I want to create shared spaces we can inhabit in our heads. In a loud and damaged world, I am making quiet places where not much happens. This can look painful but I believe that healing first requires contemplation of pain. Dis-locations and re-locations in my work are for joining those divided by the lines of past violence. Behind my art work, there is the hope of love. .