This work contains three chairs. The central chair is an actual antique Hogarth Chair made of Mahogany. I bought this chair at great expense with some of my Yale fellowship money after facing a backlash for a text I wrote to accompany a self portrait by Hogarth in the Tate. I pointed out that the chair is feminine black and curvacious, it was grown in the Tropics and brought to the UK by boat, often transported in the same huls as slaves travelling the same routes. These many parallels give the chair an undeniable relationship to the black female body. Hogarth used tipping chairs in his paintings to point to social ills as do I in my sculptural practice by pointing out a social ill that supported Georgian London.
I purchased a Hogarth chair from my Yale fellowship money and sat with it, not to disprove those who were up at arms in my comments but to see if the black woman I was intuiting could step forward. I discovered the back of the chair has what is known as "paper scrolling " I felt these were nipples. They would be touched blindly every time the chair is moved. I removed them from the back and put them on the front of the female silhouette which forms the back of the chair. Because the is a challenging history of exhibiting naked black bodies in museums in Europe I added waist beads. These show that this woman is not "available" in terms of Hogarth's times as she is in a committed relationship and that she is dressed in terms of her own culture. At the top of the chair is a shell it can be read as a shell or as the head of an African woman looking down with her hair in corn row. I added the backs of two other chairs with these shells. These two women's bodies are not open to gaze but shrouded by the cloud, maybe they are cloud. I felt they are all three looking down not in subjugation but because they are looking at where they have been and where they are rising from (Sankofa). Rising happens together so it needed to be a group of figures. The backs of the other two chairs relate to the comb and the cloud, symbols I have worked on in other works. The three black women are rooting and rising together. The choice of three women relates to the Antonio Canova's "Three Graces", and Blake's work "Europe supported by Africa and Asia". The presence of the shell and the female form relates the work to Botacheli's Venus in interesting ways.
With this work the tipping, tipped falling and crawling figures that are an amalgamation of life forms that I have been working on for over a decade are resolved as these chairs do more than stand, they are indivisible from the ground and the sky. I imagine this will be my final chair.