At Kamloops Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada, December 2022

Alicia Henry’s moving exhibition, Witnessing, inspired in part by Henry’s Ghanian mask collection, subverts and complicates pervasive cultural stereotypes of black African American women. During multiple visits to the exhibition, I found myself oscillating between deeply personal, intuitive responses and self-consciously awkward, political responses. The dichotomy of my responses made me wonder – was I able to listen carefully to what this collection of artworks had to tell me, or were the culturally framed narratives I carry with me so insistent that I was imprinting the work with my own prejudices? This essay is a consideration of that tension.

Untitled (Couple), (detail), 2008, Canvas, acrylic, thread (detail)

On entering the exhibition, I encountered two large clown heads, one male, one female, a clown is a theatrical archetype, allowing the wearer to adopt buffoon and clown-like behaviours for comedic, melancholic and often subversively political effect. Made of fabric and applique, paint and stitching, the method of creation of Untitled (Couple), 2008, spoke to the tradition of decorative, feminine craft practices often used in service of domestic comfort and economy. For example, quilts made from material remnants. In this case, the work had a deeper metaphoric layer, the open appliqued smiles left space for the underlying, darker emotional fabric of the work to reveal itself. I was taken by surprise when on entering the exhibition, the first works I encountered, the two heads that make up Untitled (Couple), made me gasp in pain. Freshly arrived in Canada, I was carrying a painful jaw issue, a consequence of a habit that I had no awareness of. Apparently, I have been grinding my teeth at night – a recent development. It seems that major life events had silted up to tip the barometer of my equilibrium towards the red zone. I didn’t see it coming and it took someone else to diagnose it. I flew to Kamloops in BC Canada as a remedy – more on that later.

The first time I visited Alicia Henry’s Witnessing, I was continually overcome, immersed in what I read in the work as the intergenerational trauma of black African American women.  Henry’s figurative works are undoubtedly potent – redolent of blood and bandages with an elegant mend and make do attitude, a high aesthetic sensibility and an unflinching determination to disrupt and disturb cultural representations and narratives.  The bodies of work in Witnessing, based mostly on black, female bodies and faces made from paper, cardboard, leather, felt, fabric and more, hold the wall like … what? Can you answer that? What do they make you think of?  Are they Effigies? Icons? Black Madonna’s? Vestments? Last season’s clothes? Outdated stereotypes? Shed skins…? If they are masks, are they theatrical, ritual or personal in nature? One thing is for sure – they are layered. Materially and metaphorically.

Rubbed with ink, paint, and dye, and drawn over with graphite and pastel, passages of hand stitching reading like sutures over wounds or hieroglyphs on the walls of ancient tombs. The materials that make up these dark-hued personages are impregnated with colour, the worked surfaces absorbing pigment and light. Alicia Henry’s drawings hold the wall with gravitas, they walk the line between portraiture, ritual artefacts, and representation. Henry in her interview with curator Daina Augaitis nominates that the work also holds humour and joy. I tend towards the serious, and one wonders if what Henry references is the humour of the initiated? One can always laugh at one’s own family/communities experience from the inside, with more liberty than one can from the outside. Some of the deepest laughter can be found in some of the darkest places, laughter operating as a healing salve, an exercise in political will – taking cultural stereotypes, insults and pejoratives and revealing their absurdity.

As a white woman encountering these works, I recognise that I stand outside the lived experiences of black women. I also recognise my own earnestness to hold space for the work to tell its’ own tale.  As a woman – the references to body, to community, to familial ties resonate with elements of my own lived experience. The over life-sized scale of many of the works present these bodies as more than human, larger than life, they hold their own space and appear to hold their own counsel – is that because what we are looking at is the husk, the mask and costume steeped in history that’s been removed and left behind as an historical cultural artifact? To see the exhibition – is to be in the process of witnessing – an active verb in the present tense. I am left grappling with the questions: What am I witnessing? What is my responsibility as a witness? Or are the works themselves doing the witnessing and I am the subject/object of the act of witnessing?

Untitled, (13 female figures), 2019, Acrylic, dye, thread, charcoal, pastel, graphite, coloured pencil, yarn, cotton, rayon, linen, wool, felt, canvas, paper, wood, cardboard, nails (detail)

The major work in the exhibition is Untitled, (13 female figures), 2019, which in this site-specific iteration has 11 figures installed in one high-ceilinged room. The commanding central figure, stands two stories high, surrounded by black paper silhouettes of small birds, two young girls stand each side of the central figure and white paper flowers bloom exuberantly at the hem of their dresses. On first encounter, the weight of the regal presence of the central figure in her commanding red dress, kept me at a distance. Over several visits, I discovered details, not immediately apparent, like the two short vertical rows of nails, hammered into the wall beside the figures, evocative of the African tradition of hammering nails into sculpture a spart of the ritual process of getting guidance from a Sharman or wise man. I also noticed on second exposure, rows of nails between the bird silhouettes that radiate outwards from the head like a garland or a halo. The halo effect adding to the authority the figure commands. Powerful objects and the role of ritual, the full complexities of which I am not privy to, are threaded throughout this exhibition.

Untitled (cluster), 2019, Acrylic, graphite, thread, paper, cardboard (detail)

Untitled (cluster), and Untitled (fragments) draw on the threads of shared feminine knowledge with wombs and breast shapes, vulvas and limbs collaged and /or cut out of and into materials of various colours, from black to brown to tan, to pink, and even grey which, when we look at colour theory is all the colours mixed into one. The carefully laid out, female, body parts, evoke dynamic, open ended, visual narratives whose complexity resists our desire to pin them down with cool words and precise language. Untitled (cluster) and Untitled (fragments) offer a rich repository of gesture, where the narrative traces accumulate over time. The act of witnessing is an inherently moral one that requires a commitment of attention. Being an authentic witness to the story of another is one of the most profound acts of generosity we can offer. As Kafka says, ‘Everyone is necessarily the hero of their own imagination’. The act of bearing witness to the story of another decenters the self, and this recalibration of focus always brings consequences, personally, socially, and politically. The role of witness for women is even more fraught as women have been cast as unreliable witnesses since at least Biblical times when the women who witnessed Christ rising from the grave were not believed. A crucial step in building a just and fair community is the act of bearing witness, another, is allowing what we witness to informs our actions. This thoughtful exhibition has left me … thinking … about both sides of the act of witnessing, of allowing the self to be seen and of allowing ourselves to see others.

As to why I sought out a visit to Kamloops in Canada in early December in an effort to solve an intensely painful jaw issue, here’s the context: My first born, a daughter, had given birth to her first born, a son, in Kamloops in Mid-November, my husband and I live in Sydney. In a sensible navigation of hemispheres and available holidays, we decided to meet our grandson in January when his mum and dad were bringing him to Australia to meet the extended family. How little did I understand the umbilical cord that still ties me to my children and now to my grandchildren. The jaw pain was real, the result of unbeknownst-to-me, night-time teeth grinding. The trip to Canada was a salve, allowing me to touch and smell and hear the new baby boy in our family, and support my beautiful girl and her besotted partner. The visceral relief I felt on being in close physical contact with my child’s child was profound. My experience of my body bonding to his worked in direct correlation to the pain in my jaw subsiding. The brutal weight and consequence of stretching too thinly the primal bond between mother, child and grandchild, has now given me a much deeper repository of compassion for grandmothers separated from their grandchildren by oceans, by landmasses and by life.  

Alicia Henry’s work investigates how bodies hold intergenerational story, including joy and pain and how memory is complicated, nuanced, and intimate as well as impactful, cultural, and always political. Life leaves its traces on our bodies and our psyches, sometimes we leave traces of ourselves inside the masks we adopt, sometimes the masks we adopt leave traces and these traces become like salt in the ocean – we can’t see it, but it’s always there, touching and affecting not only us but also those around us and future generations.

I have come to understand the exhibition as a disruption of outdated cultural stereotypes of black African American women and an investigation into the practice of masking. I am using the term masking to refer both to the theatrical adoption of masks as a dramaturgical trope and to the practice of presenting a socially acceptable ‘mask’ to the world and hiding one’s true self as a practice of self-preservation. Henry’s use of masks as a leitmotif in Witnessing, presents us with a complex and complicated provocation: How do we authentically bear witness to stories and lives that have been effectively masked and are therefore only partially revealed to us. Whilst personal stories have the potential to encourage a compassionate stance in the witness – is personal exposure always necessary – creating as it does a burden on the subject to reveal all. An unfair burden that risks continually refreshing old wounds and keeping the narrative looking backwards.

I visited Witnessing by Alicia Henry during an intense, profoundly emotional time in my life when the death of my feisty, fabulous, and fierce mother and the birth of our first precious grandchild, occurred just months apart. Sadly, mum died before her first great grandson was born. The legacy of her formidable loyalty and incredible resilience are part of our family narrative as too are her emotional volatility and fierceness. We are all shaped by what and who went before us and it is my hope that the fierceness in my mum, in large part caused by her fraught relationship with her Irish Catholic father, can soften into equanimity and strength in subsequent generations through intergenerational acts of ‘remembering as repair’. I hope that the current cultural impetus towards ‘remembering as repair’ resonates with Alicia Henry’s exquisite and deeply moving exhibition, Witnessing. Indeed, I hope witnessing and ‘remembering as repair’ manifests throughout our cultural, political, and personal lives and contributes to a more just and equitable society. A big dream from a personal and situated perspective, but, as Kafka said, ‘Everyone is necessarily the hero of their own imagination,’

I will finish this personal essay by acknowledging some of the people that have supported the artworks in Witnessing through their gestation, delivery, and growing independence, which includes but is not limited to, Alicia Henry the artist, Daina Augaitis the independent curator, Charo Neville curator at Kamloops Art Gallery and of course, you the audience who draw the impact of Witnessing into your lives and communities.

Thank you