For my doctoral project – Africana Unmasked: Fugitive Signs of Africa in Tate’s Collection of British Art – I undertook practice-based research by making artworks in response to the Tate Britain’s collection, which is conveniently next door to
Chelsea college where I study.
The concept of art as research can be slippery so a rough analogy might be to imagine my studio as a laboratory, with my practice and the collection functioning as a chemistry set.
I would analyse, document and mix up the various elements before finally scrutinising the results. Back in 2007, while researching the bicentenary of Britain’s abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, I had noticed how Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait of Elizabeth I glamorised the Tudor monarch – just like modern-day films about her do – with no hint whatsoever of her role in the atrocities against African people.
Indeed, this is echoed by the recent Rhodes Must Fall campaign to remove a statue
of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes from outside a college at the University of Oxford. I wondered what kind of other identities and narratives were somehow masked by artworks in the Tate’s British collection, so I began by considering how I could make new work that produced a critical response.
This resulted in my painting The Rescue of Andromeda, a portrait of a young, British-Nigerian woman sitting in a nocturnal landscape. But looming in the darkness behind her is the shape of a figure painted from Henry Fehr’s 1893 sculpture of the same name.
My art history studies revealed that there was a western tradition of always depicting Andromeda – a mythical Ethiopian princess – as a white woman even though some interpreters, such as Roman poet Ovid, thought of her as black.
My painting was, as far as I know, the first time a British artist had ever addressed
the Andromeda myth by working with the image of a black woman.
Kimathi Donkor is an artist studying at Chelsea College of Arts, London. Interview by John Holt.
Chelsea college where I study.
The concept of art as research can be slippery so a rough analogy might be to imagine my studio as a laboratory, with my practice and the collection functioning as a chemistry set.
I would analyse, document and mix up the various elements before finally scrutinising the results. Back in 2007, while researching the bicentenary of Britain’s abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, I had noticed how Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait of Elizabeth I glamorised the Tudor monarch – just like modern-day films about her do – with no hint whatsoever of her role in the atrocities against African people.
Indeed, this is echoed by the recent Rhodes Must Fall campaign to remove a statue
of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes from outside a college at the University of Oxford. I wondered what kind of other identities and narratives were somehow masked by artworks in the Tate’s British collection, so I began by considering how I could make new work that produced a critical response.
This resulted in my painting The Rescue of Andromeda, a portrait of a young, British-Nigerian woman sitting in a nocturnal landscape. But looming in the darkness behind her is the shape of a figure painted from Henry Fehr’s 1893 sculpture of the same name.
My art history studies revealed that there was a western tradition of always depicting Andromeda – a mythical Ethiopian princess – as a white woman even though some interpreters, such as Roman poet Ovid, thought of her as black.
My painting was, as far as I know, the first time a British artist had ever addressed
the Andromeda myth by working with the image of a black woman.
Kimathi Donkor is an artist studying at Chelsea College of Arts, London. Interview by John Holt.
