My new creative project is a series of words to accompany photographs and family home movie footage. This project began with a visual art piece I developed for the Writers’ Centre Kingston 2019 Photopoetry Exhibition at the Museum of the Futures, curated by Steven Fowler, which used greeting cards sent between my grandmother and her younger sister over fifty years as the basis for visual poetry inspired by modernist ideas of collage. The work draws together my creative practice with my critical concerns for an emerging discourse of the transglossic centred around dialogue as the defining feature of contemporary literary expression, speaking across individual subject positions, and my ongoing concerns for questions of identity politics. In this context, I am particularly keen to explore the gaps, hauntings and erasures in contemporary Britain of the working-class culture into which I was born.
I come to this project with trepidation, in that it is the most explicitly personal project I have engaged with. My critical work around race is inflected with my awareness of my family’s relationship to the British Empire, my father’s mother having emigrated to Britain from Gibraltar during World War Two. Yet exploring my connection to working class culture feels much riskier than this personal-critical crossing. Risky, that is, both in the sense of risk to myself, and to the communities and individuals I am exploring. Like many artists in this regard I feel a burden of representation, simultaneously with an awareness of the instability of the signifier that I am evoking, a desire to touch something and announce it as ‘real’ so as to give it life and counter its cultural erasure, but also an uncertainty of my own credentials. The work itself therefore must be viewed as a materiality of these complexities and their irresolution.
It is different, this home writing. Different to sit with these people. I have sat with my imagined characters, and with the voices of other people’s work. I have connected to these voices, and that connection is at times visceral. But yet it is different. Different not because I have necessarily known these people, for in many cases the grainy images in the photographs are individuals I have never met. Different not because they are somehow less strange than my own characters, for in many ways those characters I have created are more known to me. Different, then, for what can rather only be described as a matter of weight.
They are heavy, these people. And the writing they call from me is also heavy with the weight of their bearing upon my conjured, unstable, and imagined selfhood.
Whether this bearing is imaginary or real is impossible to say. It is not, then, that this home writing gets me closer to myself, or tells me who I am, if there is indeed an 'am' to be determined. Rather, it is that this writing brings me closer to a self I see myself to be, closer to a self that is connected albeit with veils and imaginaries, to a history that is itself woven into the same process with a ceaseless recurrence.
It makes me heavy, this writing.
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