The Brooklyn-based artist talks us through her anti-assimilationist practice, as a new exhibition opens in London’s Arcadia Missa
Originally from London and now living in Brooklyn, Phoebe Collings-James is a British-Jamaican artist who describes her practice as “intentionally messy and sprawling”. Deftly moving between drawing, video, sculpture, text and sound, she questions the relations between subject and object in a process of “symbolic layering” which aims to explore post-colonial anxieties and the problems posed by traditional Western aesthetics.
Her upcoming show, Relative Strength, at Arcadia Missa’s new space in Soho, will interrogate ancient and ingrained signs and symbols – from the equal-sided cross of neutrality and aid to the brass bells associated with shame and warning. As part of what she terms an “anti-assimilationist practice” she aims to give her objects – fragile, beautiful things, informed by centuries of craft – agency, removing them from the plinth and allowing them to disrupt the space they inhabit.
On madness…
“I’m interested in things being on the brink of something. I’ve been working with these ceramic objects that are mostly orb or bowl-type shapes and [in the show] some of them will be resting somewhat precariously full of water, while the crosses will be suspended by straps. They’re in a balance, but it’s precarious, especially when they have water in them. I think a lot about this feeling of vertigo, and being on the brink, and that’s something that relates to being black, being paranoid, and feeling conscious of being close to madness and losing control – and wanting to lose control also. But also wanting to be held.”
On the crosses in her work…
“I’ve been thinking about the cross a lot in terms of devotional objects and… how we feel in relation to them being sites for emotion. There are certain things that are allowed exclusively in that space that might not be allowed in other areas. I’m interrogating this shape of the even-sided cross and the Geneva Convention and the things that evokes for me – the confusion of the ethics of war.”
On using ceramics…
“In terms of the aesthetic of the sculptures, my aim was to make them look and feel extremely beautiful, and to play with the thing that is most desirable about them – which is actually not really what’s going on as a theme in ceramics at the moment, even though it’s having a resurgence. I think people are definitely trying to use garish colours, and make things look quite shit on purpose. And so I think my reason for wanting to use what could either seem like rip offs of Japanese or [Bernard] Leach kinds of techniques, is that those techniques are based in care and skill and an obvious connection to the materials.”
On the object and the gaze…
“Something that Jamila [Johnson-Small] and I have been talking about is what does an anti-assimilationist practice look like, what does anti-assimilationist work look, or feel, or sound like? I think that somehow ties in to not just thinking about the objects as only having an objecthood that is relational to representation and a gaze. I’ve also been thinking about that kind of mode of regarding the object as being a very Western thing, and how that isn’t the way that objects are considered in all places. For example, in Africa... there is a history of regarding objects and art objects as having a subjecthood and having a life.”
Relative Strength runs until May 31, 2018, at Arcadia Missa, London.
