I don't use a studio in the kind of traditional sense of the studio.
This is not a place of making it's more a place of thinking and rummaging.
That is exactily how i feel about my studio. But of course that's just a personal thing that I'm trying to relate to myself.
More crucial is what she says about her art installation, in which she worked with hair.
Do You Want to Touch?
People of African descent - people often want to touch their hair. Usually it can be a stranger coming up to someone wanting to touch their hair. It harts back to a very long memory of the African body being public property. The point about these works is that they were made to be handled by the audience. By these objects being removed from the body there's something quite violent but they become kind of disgusting. Even though if we think of hair and intimacy as something quite lovely the moment that there is no longer a body there it's like why has that been divorced from a body?
The following two quotes also speak to me in a way that inspires me to understand how she works.
In more recent years I've tried to let go of the idea of there being a message per se but a way of working. Increasingly that involves people improvising and being really spontaneous in the moment in that it gets captured.(...) I am trying desperately not to tell people what to think versus what I think the early works were because that was all these things that I had to say.
Sonia Boyce - Gathering a History of Black Women / Tate Studios
Wednesday, 4
Editor's Note
When we started this site more than twenty years ago (I've been the "web designer" since the beginning), the web links page was particularly important to me. I remember a design on a dark red background - when I was a bit more advanced in html - with the titles of sites bouncing around that you could be lucky to catch. At the time I thought the internet was crucial for linking to other sites and it felt important to showcase our network. It was a time when I realized that it doesn't take much to rate as a poor second. I wanted to stay tuned. Later, of course, I learned that my network wouldn't catapult me into the spaces I longed for. Over the decades the site with the weblinks has lost relevance to me and it might be years before I revisited it. My focus was absolutely on the bloq, where I still need to scream out to the world what has to be said or not. That's not to say I've eliminated the Links page entirely. By tradition, I leave it in. But I've revised it today in a way that may seem kinda radical. I tried to make it less personal by kicking out the friends section. The fact that friends mean something on the Internet is made clear on fb. However, what is called a friend does not necessarily have to be a friend. Or here is a so-called friend and there a real one. Anyway, I thought they looked weird among the others and maybe to be linked by me doesn't even please them. So I removed the links to my friends' pages. I don't forget them because they are my friends. If I forget them, we'll part ways, which is okay too. I know that my web design knowledge is totally out of date and you might find it rude for me to even mention what I do here. But actually I don't care if this site is designed according to the latest standards, and as I wrote at some point, this website is an archive and not an advertising platform.
Monday, 2
Al-Fitr Mubarak
Sunday, 1
Art Space Work of the Month
Bob Bonies (*1937) - Square Room V, 1968, silkscreen, 60x59.5cm