SG: What course did you study at UAL and what is your practice?
DW: I studied a couple of courses at UAL. I did my BA in Graphic Design at Camberwell and I graduated in 2001. I then had a really long gap from education. I came back in 2016 and did a graduate diploma in Fine Art at Chelsea. I consider myself a visual artist and I work in performance and sound installation. I also consider teaching a part of my practice.
SG: What inspired the pieces submitted for the Tell Us About It and why did you want to take part in it?
DW: The piece that I submitted to Tell Us About It was inspired by my time at UAL. I wanted to take part because I wanted other students like me to have more successful time and to benefit from my experience and hopefully, my experience would help them learn at UAL. I think it is really important for other students of colour to realise that they are not the only ones, as I felt really isolated in my time at UAL. I am hoping that other students know about the Tell Us About It archives as it is important because once you know that other people are having the same experience as you, you don’t feel so lonely and it makes it a little bit easier.
SG: How has your practice developed since you graduated?
DW: When I graduated from Chelsea, I went on to do an MA at Temporary Art Practice at the RCA, specialising in performance pathway. Doing my MA gave me an opportunity to really explore my performance practice. For the first time ever, I was actually able to work with professors and tutors that also had a performance practice, which was great. So now I’ve kind of not come back full circle, but I’m in a position now where I’m looking to explore other areas of my practice.
SG: How has UAL contributed to your professional journey?
DW: At UAL getting my final quantification, having had a brilliant course leader named Katrine Hjelde, she was really supportive of me and gave me some great advice because I was finding it really hard during my time at Chelsea. I found it really hard connecting with the cohort, which is a really important part of learning I believe. Especially within Fine Art, connecting with the people that you’re learning with, that is where you are going to learn from more so than the tutors, I believe. So, she gave me some really valuable advice about connecting with different cohorts within UAL, saying that if the cohort I had wasn’t helpful or I wasn’t able to connect with them, that I should try and find my cohort, which is exactly what I did.
She also told me to follow what I was interested in. She empowered me to find my own learning and find my own resources, and to find areas that I was interested in rather than doing what I was told or doing what I was asked. She helped me to understand that education is not so much about being told what to do but it is about you finding your own education, your own learning. And this was really invaluable advice.
Then following on from that I was asked to take part in Teaching Within due to being part of the Tell Us About It programme, and that is developing my academic practice. As part of the programme, I am studying a PG Cert in Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication. Finishing my MA and then going on this course – to be fast-tracked to becoming an academic – is an incredible opportunity that is facilitated through UAL by Aisha Williams from Shades of Noir. Being part of the SoN programme has given me confidence and empowered me to pursue my ambitions as a creative practitioner.
SG: What advice can you give to students currently studying at UAL, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds?
DW: Don’t be intimidated. Realise that you have just as much right as everyone else to be there. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and assistance and keep asking for help and assistance even if you don’t get it the first time. As I mentioned before, I think education has become such a business so don’t fall into the role of being a consumer – find your own path, find your own education within the system and feed yourself; don’t be afraid. I found it really difficult being a student of colour; from dealing with micro-aggressions to having knowledge presented to you by people and from people that don’t look like you. To find strategies to get on, to not let that get in the way of your learning is really hard. To get by you have to kind of almost inhabit two bodies in some way. You have the ‘student body’ and then your ‘personal body’.
Why should you be separated?
Other students don’t have to separate themselves like that.
If you have not got someone there, i.e. a tutor that is looking out for you, even a strong cohort or a little group of friends, then it can be really lonely and that really holds you back. So, I think it is really important to try and find your network and find your community and don’t hide away – be present.
SG: What has been your most memorable project so far?
DW: They are all memorable, but I would say the piece that I submitted to the Tell Us About it was really a breakthrough work for me in the fact that it brought together my musical and arts practices to create this work that spoke directly about my own experience. The work is called Big Invisible Fridge which is a metaphor for whiteness and as a response to my time as a student in UAL. I was very frustrated about how it felt that we’ve changed very little since I graduated in 2001. So, for me to kind of take that experience and translate and transform that it into song and present that as an artwork was a bold step for me within my practice.
SG: How do you keep yourself motivated?
DW: I am quite a motivated individual. I am always striving to reach a place, even though that place might be unreachable or impossible by other people’s methods and standards. It is my goals and visions that keep me motivated. The times when I am feeling unmotivated, I reach to my community, my friends and the people around me.
My mom is a big inspiration for me. She’s a woman of colour. She’s been working in the NHS for over 45 years. Just her stories and things that she had to deal with coming to the UK from the Caribbean, the nonsense and the injustice and all of what she has had to put up with, but yet, she managed her family, she’s managed to maintain her job. She’s managed to get to a certain position – she would have got higher has she not been in the body that she is in. But I hear, I remember her stories and see where she’s doing and I think, ‘wow, you know?’
Things have changed in that we experienced this oppression in a very different way then our parents did. It’s a lot more invisible. It is way more ingrained within the system. It is a lot more insidious. So, I think about my mom, and she really motivates me. I think about what my grandparents had to deal with. You got to keep on, and also, I look to the future for that as well. I don’t have children myself, but that’s not really the point. It’s about embracing this idea of community and looking to the future, I heard Angela Davis speak at the Southbank about her own activism and people asked her similar question about how she keeps doing what she’s doing and she talked about how things don’t happen instantly. We are so used to things happening instantly with access to most things that we think that change is the same and it is not. You have to think about your moves from a long-term perspective. What I am doing now might make a difference tomorrow, next week or even in five years time and maybe in 30 years time. Therefore, I think it is really important to just remember that change is gradual.
SG: Is there a message you are trying to convey in your creative expressions?
DW: My creative expression is changing. When I first started making work in a dedicated practice – about three years ago – my practice and my expression was very much a reaction to the system that I was part of. A lot of that was dealing with western supremacy, systems of knowledge and politics of space. As a performance artist, I am always thinking about the performativity of the body and how our bodies are always performing. Therefore, being in a female POC body, I’m always performing this kind of message. Often in my work, I was trying to highlight and draw attention to the kinds of landscapes that different bodies inhabit and give ‘form’ to power dynamics that we might experience in our day-to-day lives.
I have always felt this kind of urgency in my work to talk about these other things that I have experienced because I feel that it’s important, not only to connect with other people that might be experiencing those things but in the wider sense to create a space for people to reflect upon their own complicity within these power dynamics that are at play. So, I really saw my work as this tool to allow this access, but now am very much considering what does my work look like without that? How would my work develop without that? But it always comes back to being present, about me being present. Being a female POC, living in London in 2020 – just to be making art is a radical thing. So, no matter what I do, that is always the bottom line.
It’s like, ‘I’m here’.
SG: How do you reflect on your work?
DW: This is interesting because I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Doing the PG Cert where we are thinking about pedagogy, a lot of it seems about reflection and artistic practice is about reflection – that is how we learn, that is how we grow and how we move forward and develop our work. But I don’t think I have ever consciously reflected, it’s almost that I don’t even notice that I’m doing it. So, I’m trying to be conscious and capture those reflections and materialise them through writing or audio recordings. Through blogging them you process them, which is helpful for me. I also think talking to people, talking to my community of artists or friends is a really helpful way to stimulate reflective thought.
SG: What challenges did you face going to UAL?
DW: The biggest challenge I faced at UAL during my studies was the lack of diversity in the teaching staff and curriculum. Having to deal with the repetition of the same voices that made me feel like I didn’t belong. Voices that didn’t speak to me or acknowledge my lived experience, that upheld a narrative consistent with the centering of whiteness. Dealing with micro-aggressions from other students was also difficult, as was the expectation that I should educate others in regards to their own whiteness and the privileges that it affords.
SG: How did you navigate these challenges?
In order to navigate these challenges I had to adopt a less passive approach to my learning, actively find the voices in academia that spoke to my experience. Finding support from friends and other academics that could relate to the violence of systemic racism within the institution was also really important.
- What would you have hoped the university/course/program would do differently?
DW: I would have hoped that the university would have looked to actively diversify its teaching staff. Alongside making sure that all teaching staff were aware of and in practice of inclusive teaching and learning pedagogical approaches, to ensure that the curriculum reflects the diversity of experience in our society. To foster a criticality and awareness in students, producing graduates that are able to go into industry and challenge the norms that uphold structures of exclusion.
- How have your reflections evolved around the piece you submitted?
DW: At the time when I submitted the piece Big Invisible Fridge, the work was a response to the institution and my experience of it. Reflecting on the work now I think that it’s still relevant in the context of the current political landscape. I have performed the work several times using different live approaches and in different types of spaces from white cube spaces to lecture halls to clubs. It’s interesting how the work operates differently depending on where it is situated and who the audience is. How the audience changes the work. The difference between white people leaving and black people cheering.
