The small sky is a way of bringing a space to meditate and expand upon notions of blackness during a lockdown, potentially when there is no access to a sky.

The work contains all of the themes of the larger sky but is in dialogue with the European traditions of display when looking at a preserved version of an aspect of the natural world.

Small Skies

"Small Skies" are an index of "Sky" first installed at the Villa Romana in Italy. Vast open skies inspired "Sky". These pieces were made when so many places the celestial were inscribed as white Christian spaces were simultaneously on fire in a way that caught mass media attention. (Large parts of Brazil, Australia, and Africa). What are the commonalities of black and brown people in all those spaces, and how could that commonality suggest the celestial? African textured hair as cloud is an attempt to build a new sky centring black people. The black cloud is the fertile cloud. It carries the water from one place and will scatter it in another. The black cloud is authentically in relationship with many soils. Whilst negatively loaded in English, the black cloud is the necessary cloud, ready to release the life-giving water. It is the fertile pregnant cloud.

Victorians kept animals and birds under glass domes or bell jars as a kind of index, an archive for scientific and visual pleasure. Black people have a history of display as flora and fauna in European institutions. The glass references this and the writings of black people who articulate the present-day lived experience of being a touchable specimen in predominantly white spaces. The glass enables looking but not touching.

Most importantly, the bell jar is not used to single out, identify, examine and "pin down" a single species or gas. Instead, the work separates a commonplace trait of many black people in a non-identifiable way. The hair is isolated in the jar in such a way as to suggest visual connections with wider cyclical natural systems of the biosphere as a whole. The work is offered as a jumping-off point to unpin meanings. An inversion of the European use of this jar used to pin down identities. To move from looking to thinking, feeling, and reworking the idea of "black" from its familiar fixity to intuiting black as a space that is potentially soft, shapeshifting, powerful, celestial, life-giving, and beyond borders.

Everywhere that the sky has been violently reimagined as a white celestial place is on fire right now, the continent of Africa, in Brazil, in Australia, wanting to visually reclaim the sky as a powerful black space afro-textured hair is the vessel to do it.

Clouds cycle through many colours, the black cloud is the pregnant fertile life-giving cloud.

I used a multitude of different hair textures in this work.
Sky reclaims the celestial as a black space. Perhaps when we reimagine a nourished sky as black when we look at each other as black people we can see celestial beings.

The clouds are a mixture of the afro textures used to simulate hair and real hair.

The clouds live kind of diaspora beyond any single nation-state ascending from the soil in one nation returning to the soil in another.

Now the world is burning and environmental catastrophe is near, it looks like black peoples on many continents have lost thier fight for soil, to own and determine ancestral lands and land and property in the lands we have been migrated to and from with or without choice.

There is a visual irony that over/development has always blackened the sky. Without these developments, a dark sky would simply herald the advent of just enough of an essential life-giving force: rain.

Black ways of understanding the soil and the sky have long been looked down on as undeveloped perhaps the opposite will be shown to be true, the white cloud can be seen as the "undeveloped" black cloud. Development is a matter of perspective.

The work is about a powerful vision of black collectivity, it is a group of singular clouds but individuation is not lost entirely, nor is a fixed ideal or imposed upon the collective which always stays loose and fluid both "me" and "we" are possible. In certain formations, this is more or less apparent another reason why this is a sculptural work.

The clouds are a black space that is fluid beyond binaries and fixity, too often symbols of black close down meanings rather than opening them up.