Dr Sequoia Barnes is a RACE.ED Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow. Her work is primarily textile art and ceramic sculpture but often involves stitching/embroidery, installation, and assemblage, predominately informed by her research-led exploration of black radical art practice.
For the RACE.ED Stuart Hall Foundation Fellowship, I would like to start a new iteration of ‘Useable Several Times’ that will focus on 20th century British visual culture, specifically the practice of illustrating and animating the golliwog figure.
This practice-based research will use a post-structuralist semiotic framework, specifically the semiotics of difference and the semiotic ‘other’. I have always used Stuart Hall’s observation of ‘transcoding through the eye of representation’ interchangeably with ‘reappropriation’ to disarticulate racist ephemera as a black artist and researcher of the arts. Hall’s ‘Constituting an Archive’ (2001) is also crucial to my disarticulation of archives and archival. ‘Constituting an Archive’ has also been extremely vital to framing ‘Useable Several Times’ as an always ongoing archive-in-progress and decolonizing what it means to ‘collect’, ‘preserve’, and ‘archive’.
Utilizing my stitching/embroidery practice, I will subvert some of my archive findings and reappropriate them to reflect their true nature as disturbing images. My alteration process involves tracing the original image but changing the faces of the figures to reflect a more overt line between cuteness and grotesqueness while leaving the surrounding imagery and text unchanged. I deploy an Afrosurreal aesthetic by making the figures appear more alien/unreal with strange pupils and wide smiles with too many teeth.
I also record ‘amplified stitchings’ of each embroidery during the stitching process. These recordings are conducted using contact or instrument amplifying microphones attached to the embroidery hoop and my hands to amplify the ‘hidden’ sound of stitching to rearticulate the practice as radical and disruptive versus the common idea of stitching/sewing being a quiet, docile, invisible act. As sonic disruption, stitching gestures produce sounds of scratching, growling, rustling, and puncture.
Dr Barnes' portfolio: https://sequoiakoydaniellebarnes.com/