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Artefact: Veronica Ryan’s Windrush Commission sculpture
Year 1 BA Fine Art Camberwell visit as part of Unit 4: Activating Practice
Image 1
Introduction
This report is about a site-visit and talk I organised in May 2022 to see Veronica Ryan’s Windrush Commission sculpture in Hackney (Ryan, 2021, pictured at image 1) and chat to Lauren Gee, a Public Programmes Producer from Create London who commissioned the work.
I am a White cisgender woman. A Londoner from birth, I grew up in a low parental income household, going to a diverse school in West London, and spending weekends surrounded by Hindu and Sikh community and culture as my parents attended meetings of Indian-based sect Radha Soami Satsang Beas (see RSSB Official, 2010-22). We had to leave London when I was 10 years old because the family could no longer afford to live there. On reflection, this direct experience of gentrification and being forced out of a diverse metropolitan area to a White-dominant rural area may influence my disidentification (Muñoz, 1999) with Whiteness and the importance I place on honouring and defending diversity in the capital.
Context
In May-June 2022 I led Unit 4 – Activating Practice, cross-course with Year 1 BA Fine Art students. The unit is broadly about public, site-specific art practice. I particularly wanted the students to consider public art in the wake of Black Lives Matter, with the toppling of statues of slave traders, and think about what and who public art is for (Gentleman, 2022).
As part of the unit I organised a visit to Veronica Ryan’s Windrush Commission (2021). She has created three large scale sculptures of Caribbean fruit that reference her childhood and visiting Ridley Road market with her mother. Through conversation with Gee, we explained to the students that the Windrush Generation were Caribbean workers who were invited to the UK during the period 1948-1973, then many decades later in 2018 experienced the trauma of “the Windrush scandal, which saw hundreds of elderly people of Caribbean heritage who had lived in Britain for decades detained or deported, purportedly for not having the right visa” (Gentleman, 2022).
Inclusivity
As White women are in the majority in Higher Education (Richards and Finnigan, 2015, p.4), I think it is important for me to incorporate sources beyond my own positionality: decolonising the curriculum is a collective responsibility. Archambault, Janosz, Morizot, & Pagani in Katz (2013, p.160) say “For a student to be socially engaged, they must experience a sense of belonging, interact with peers, and be involved in extracurricular and social activities within the school”. In taking students off-site I therefore felt a particular responsibility to be inclusive, and, as outlined by Jackie Parke (Parke and Parke, 2016), when putting together sources for the course, for a diverse body of voices to be represented that they could engage with. I share the aim put forward by Hahn Tapper (2013, p.415) of creating experiences that I can undergo with students, and having never seen Ryan’s piece since its opening in October 2021, I would be experiencing it ‘as new’ too.
In speaking from her cultural experience both in terms of her Caribbean heritage and growing up in Hackney, I presented this example to stimulate students to draw on their own identity and culture, giving them the opportunity to “explore personal identity in the creative process on their course. This could make a difference in creating work that is more risk-taking and experimental” (Finnigan and Richards, 2016, p. 8).
Reflection
As Morgan Quaintance pointed out in his 2020 Art Monthly article “Decolonising Decolonialism”, decolonisation cannot only operate at a symbolic level. We must acknowledge the term “decolonisation” being drawn from an actual process in occupied territories, and consider the land we occupy and gentrify. I drew the students’ attention to gentrification in London, including Hackney, where Ryan’s sculpture is based. Indeed, we learned from Create London that it was only through a fierce campaign by the local community that the Ridley Road market, that Ryan’s sculptures of fruit reference, was not lost to property development (Mauro-Benady, 2022). Spike Lee’s assertion that “There are no more black people in Brixton” and “the thing everybody neglects to talk about is: where do the people go that get displaced? Bottom line, where do they go?” (Bailey, 2014) is applicable not only to Hackney but also Peckham and Camberwell – and I encouraged the students to think about the land our college occupies there, and who their proposed public art projects would be for.
Action
The artefact was used as a talking point with Create London and the students about who the Windrush Generation are, how they were treated by the UK Government, and the process of community engagement that Ryan built from the ground up in collaboration with the people who live in the area.
My own site-specific practice is often reaching into overlooked community spaces, or sites threatened by gentrification, and undertaking art-protest projects to defend them. Although I shared this experience in a separate lecture with students, I could have drawn on this background further in engaging with this work and outlining my own positionality. I began these projects whilst living in affordable ‘shared ownership’ housing and feeling that the local communities in the poorer parts of North Kensington where I lived – were being cleaned up. Conversely, I now live in Plumstead, near Woolwich, as one of many White people with young families who are gentrifying the area. I confront my feelings of guilt and complicity in this process in my video practice in Journeys of a Laundry Mountain (Locke, 2021).
Evaluation of your process
The dialogue with Create London was brilliant, and a key part of the session. I was able to ask and have answered such pertinent questions to flag to the students as the statement on the Create London website that migrants were welcome in Hackney, which seemed to signal a community identity claimed by the borough as distinct from the UK Government. Following Hahn Tapper (2013, p.411), through the public nature of this unit I saw this as an opportunity “to empower participants to engage in social justice activism”.
The inclusion of Lauren Gee from Create London was important not only in allowing us to find out more about the work but also for myself, as a White British woman, (which as Richards and Finnigan (2015, p.4) point out, the majority of staff still are) to reach beyond my own subjectivity in creating a decolonised programme, with an aim to “incorporate the voices of “others” without colonizing them in a manner that reinforces patterns of domination” (England, 1994, p.2). Yet, as a member of the Caribbean community, Gee shared, and I must acknowledge that I benefited from, her own lived experience, that many are proud of their Windrush heritage and do not want Windrush to only be associated with the scandal. When we had finished viewing the piece, she showed us a community photography exhibition under the railway arches (image 2), and the site of the second part of the Windrush Commission, giving us a further overview of the ongoing work they are doing.
In my reflection in my individual tutorial and group peer-to-peer feedback session, it was agreed that it would be good to do more to bring the students themselves in to respond to the object. I mentioned in my peer-to-peer session that Create London had said they took the fact that the sculpture had not been graffitied as a sign of the community’s acceptance and attachment to the artwork – however, my peer pointed out that this judgement took too simplistic and hierarchical view of graffiti, and perhaps graffiti would be another way of showing acceptance/attachment/engagement with the piece.
Image 2
Conclusion
The artefact of the sculpture was a good starting point, and the incorporation of Create London into the session helped to widen the student session. However, in my work on Unit 4 the previous year, I had done more to include pre-readings to be discussed at the site, extending into drawing and installation workshops at the sites. These reflective tools were sidelined as I incorporated Create London into the visit. Hahn Tapper, 2013, p.415, drawing on Freire says that, “an ideal educational experience exists between a teacher and students rather than emanating from a teacher to students. A teacher needs to create experiences with, and not for, students, integrating their experiences and voices into the educational experience itself (Freire 2006)”.
In future, I would extend the talk into a workshop, where we could, for example, walk around the markets together and draw, film, photograph and discuss what we see; and/or a follow-up session to consider what objects we might choose from our own upbringings to turn into artworks in the communities where we grew up.
Such an approach would better allow for an experience of making with rather than for.
Image List:
1. Visit to Veronica Ryan’s Windrush Commission sculpture (Ryan, 2021).
2. Community photography installation, Hackney.
Bibliography
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