CHAPTER TEN

Sonia Boyce and Other Black
Women Artists

Sonia Boyce was one of the most important artists associated in large part with the emergence of Black artists in 1980s Britain. She was further identified – along with Lubaina Himid and others – with the emergence and development of curatorial and critical contexts addressing the practice of Black women artists of that decade. Boyce was born in London in 1962 to parents from the Caribbean countries of Barbados and Guyana. She received her art school training at Stourbridge, graduating in 1983, and then returned to London, where she has continued to live and work.

Boyce was, during the early to mid 1980s, producing wonderful, engaging large-scale pastel drawings, semi-autobiographical works that were reflective of her feminist, and indeed her womanist impulses. She became something of a household name in Britain’s art scene; it was the first time for several decades that a Black artist was represented in mixed exhibitions in which their work was seen alongside that of their white counterparts, as those of Frank Bowling and Aubrey Williams had been. Boyce was one of five artists in Room at the Top, a mixed group exhibition curated by Waldemar Januszczak that took place at Nicola Jacobs Gallery, London.¹ The other artists included in the exhibition were Gerard de Thame, Mary Mabbutt, Paul Richards, and Adrian Wiszniewski. The exhibition was one of the very few such undertakings, during the 1980s, in which the work of a Black artist was exhibited alongside work by white artists. Boyce was for a while an artist with whom Januszczak, (at the time visual arts reviewer for the Guardian), was particularly impressed. Following Boyce’s presence in group exhibitions such as this, a few years would elapse before a new generation of Black artists, for example Chris Ofili, would again be embraced in mixed exhibitions such as Room at the Top.

Boyce was one of the first Black British-born artists to have work included in The British Art Show (in 1990). Likewise, she was, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the first Black British artist ever to have a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.² Boyce is primarily known for her work as a visual artist, but over the years she has also worked as an archivist, editor, lecturer and tutor. Her work, together with that of artists such as Keith Piper, was widely exhibited in a range of exhibitions during the 1980s and beyond. These exhibitions began with the initiatives developed by Lubaina Himid such as Black Woman Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre and Five Black Women Artists at the Africa Centre, referenced in the previous chapter. From these exhibitions, Boyce went on to many other group exhibitions, among them Into the Open and Unrecorded Truths (again, both of these exhibitions featured the curatorial input of Lubaina Himid). She also had several important solo exhibitions, perhaps the most important being her 1986 show at the Air Gallery, London.³

23. Sonia Boyce, Big Woman’s Talk, 1984, exhibition poster, The Other Story (1989).

Boyce is known and celebrated for her wonderful oil pastel drawings that explored a range of personal and social narratives, touching on an astonishingly wide range of subjects: the ambiguities of Christianity and its troubling and troubled relationship with Black people; the legacies and the consequences of the British Empire; predatory and sexually abusive behaviour (from supposed close friends of the family) that often remain hidden from view; the importance of memory. All these topics and many others have featured in Boyce’s earlier work. From the late 1980s onwards, her work began to change markedly. She began to move away from her distinctive oil pastel drawings towards ways of working that utilised photography, montage, and colour photocopying. From this work, Boyce progressed to performance, installation, and other ways of working that were largely reflective of contemporary art practices of the 1990s. Her work was the subject of a monograph written by Gilane Tawadros⁴ and as an artist, illustrator and editor, her name is linked to a range of publications.

The most enduring work by Boyce has been her oil pastel drawings of the early to mid 1980s, evocative of a range of narratives centred on aspects of her identity as a Black woman of Caribbean heritage, growing up in Britain, and the multiple dimensions of those experiences. Typical in this regard is Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain so Great (1968). At a stroke, Boyce’s sampling of the phrase Lie back and think of England evoked both British military expansionism during the days of the British Empire and, simultaneously, hardships, discomforts or privations that had to be endured by colonials and expatriates in the name of, or for the sake of, this expansionism. At the core of this is a grim understanding by Boyce that whilst the phrase, in one of its original contexts, might have been somewhat jovially applied to wives needing to do their conjugal duty, the realities of sexual submission to colonials and expatriates by indigenous people, particularly women, were, during the centuries of the British Empire, of an altogether more menacing, abusive and coercive nature.

This is a profoundly empathetic work by Boyce, in which she finds common cause with those on the receiving end of the British Empire’s military, political and colonial aggression. Within the work, a Black woman – Boyce perhaps – stares out directly at the viewer, thereby putting herself directly in the mix, whilst simultaneously seeking to implicate the viewer in this unsavoury history, the consequences of which are still being played out today in many parts of the world.

The importance and success of another of her key works, Big Woman’s Talk (1984) was such that a detail of the work was used, to dramatic effect, on the poster for The Other Story exhibition. The work typified much of Boyce’s concerns during this particularly fertile period of her practice. It depicts a young girl, sitting with her elbows in her mother’s lap, seemingly staring into space, as the formidable frame of her mother fills much of the picture. Though her mother’s head is cropped at the top of the picture, we see enough of her face and mouth to know that she speaks to, or converses with, an unseen friend, neighbour or family member, out of frame, to the left side of the picture. We notice immediately several important aspects, almost trademarks, of Boyce. The woman and her young daughter (and presumably the unseen conversationalist) are sitting in a domestic environment. Here Boyce again pays loving and lavish attention to depicting the domestic environment of Caribbean homes as being important, culturally enriched spaces, the décor of which reveals much about the tastes, aspirations and lifestyles of its occupiers.

The West Indian front room⁵ has now been cast as a recognisable familial space, with its own aesthetic integrity. Many Caribbean homes during the 1960s and 1970s and indeed beyond, had a room – often a front room – that was regarded as a special environment, full of the best furniture, pictures, books, ornaments, etc. The room reflected the aspirations of the homeowners or occupiers, for whom these spaces existed as special places in the home that were ordinarily off-limits, until such time as esteemed guests visited. In a world in which many Caribbean migrants had little or no access to special places or spaces, these people, very simply, constructed their own prestigious environments, irrespective of how modest their incomes might be or how pressing a need there might be for space within often large and active families. The woman and child in Boyce’s drawing are located in such a space and Boyce has, typically, lavished an almost inordinate amount of care, attention and detail on the room’s wallpaper. Instead of executing gestural marks, to indicate wallpaper, Boyce has, as it were, created the wallpaper herself, and to this end, every bit of the background of Big Woman’s Talk is covered in Boyce’s own lavish wallpaper, evocative of the Arts and Crafts movement.⁶ Boyce was highly skilled at depicting supposedly simple scenes or scenarios that were in fact hugely layered and detailed in both their composition and meanings. The mother sits in an armchair or sofa, green in colour, and the viewer can see a section of the antimacassar – the small, sometimes embroidered pieces of rectangular cloth placed over the backs or arms of chairs, or the head or cushions of a sofa, to prevent soiling of the permanent fabric, by hands, the backs and sides of heads, and so on.

The woman’s mouth (or what we can see of it) is open, indicating conversation. A small, discreet, but perfectly placed element of the woman’s head is the earring she wears. The mother’s dress gives more than a passing nod to the African-American tradition (amongst women) of patchwork quilting. The woman’s open mouth conveys salacious tales of who (within the conversationalists’ shared group of friends, relatives or acquaintances) did what, to whom. It is this conversation, peppered with juicy titbits, on which the young girl eavesdrops, her apparently absent facial expression acting as a cheeky but successful foil.

24. Romano Cagnoni, West Indian Front Room, photograph (1971).

Though familial dirt is being dished, in reality the woman’s utterances, coupled with the astonishingly strong cultural resonances of the piece, mean that Big Woman’s Talk is in effect about the communication, not of salacious details, but of culture itself, and its familial transferences. Such work quietly but studiously celebrates the resilience, the importance, the significance of the Black woman. Astonishingly perhaps, such work was, until the arrival of artists such as Boyce and Claudette Johnson, relatively unusual. Perhaps the most substantial evidence of Boyce’s status was the way in which she came to act as something of a role model for a slightly younger generation of Black women artists. Like Boyce herself, artists such as Simone Alexander, Amanda Holiday and Mowbray Odonkor created a range of compelling works that located images and experiences of Black women, like themselves, their friends, their mothers, their sisters, at the core of their practice.

Claudette Johnson is an artist who trained in Fine Art at The Polytechnic, Wolverhampton, graduating in the early 1980s. Born in Manchester, Johnson is a contemporary of artists such as Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce, with whom she exhibited in several exhibitions in the early to mid 1980s. Johnson first began exhibiting with the Midlands-based group of art students and young artists that included the likes of Marlene Smith, Keith Piper and Donald Rodney. Later, Himid included Johnson in the Five Black Women Artists exhibition at the Africa Centre in 1983, Black Woman Time Now, at Battersea Arts Centre some months later, and The Thin Black Line, the important exhibition that took place at The ICA in London midway through the 1980s. Johnson’s work also featured in mixed gender exhibitions such as Into the Open at Sheffield’s Mappin Art Gallery in 1984 and The Image Employed, which took place at the Cornerhouse, Manchester, in 1987. In addition, Johnson has had a number of solo exhibitions.

A gifted artist with a marked ability to capture the personality of her subjects and sitters, like Boyce was to do for a period of time, Johnson has traditionally taken as her subject the image of the Black woman. In so doing, her work is inscribed with bold attempts to both counter widespread negative portrayals of the Black woman and to combat what effectively amounts to their lack of visibility in assorted arenas. Correspondingly, Johnson’s work sought to create a range of depictions of the Black female body that were free from, or resisted, objectification. As mentioned in the previous chapter, in her catalogue statements Johnson spoke eloquently about what she saw, felt and understood to be the Black woman’s specific experiences of racial and gender politics. According to Johnson, the Black woman suffered racism in ways that were different from the ways in which Black men suffered racism. Likewise, the Black woman suffered sexism in ways that were different from the ways in which white women suffered sexism. It was within the peculiarities of the Black woman’s space, framing and treatment that Johnson’s work germinated and produced such spectacular results. In this regard, Johnson’s work, like Boyce’s, could be thought of as reflecting distinctly womanist, rather than feminist, sensibilities.⁷ Johnson articulated her concerns as follows:

The experience of near annihilation is the ghost that haunts the lives of [Black] women in Britain daily. The price of our survival has been the loss of our sense of ownership of both land and body. The ownership of our ancestors’ bodies was in the hands of slave owners. The horrors of slavery and racism have left us with the knowledge that every aspect of our existence is open to abuse […] This is reinforced by the experience of a kind of social and cultural invisibility […] As women, our sexuality has been the focus of grotesque myths and imaginings.⁸

Johnson’s women tended to be monumental in scale. Oversize drawings on heavy art paper, rendered in her preferred medium of oil pastel. These portraits were imposing pieces that demanded the viewer’s attention, as well as their respect. The Black women Johnson depicted were drawn from a variety of contexts. Some were friends or otherwise known to the artist. Occasionally, her subjects would be taken from photographs. Some would be drawn clothed, some unclothed, some would be young, and some would be decidedly elderly or matriarchal. Some would be pregnant, a testimony to the importance of the Black woman in giving birth to, as well as nurturing, successive generations. Some were taken from, or located within, Caribbean contexts. Some were clearly located within African contexts. And some were located within domestic environments. Some were rendered in colour, others in more muted palettes, or in monochromatic form. Some had bodies (and occasionally faces) that were, to varying degrees, abstracted; though for the most part, Johnson’s women were highly figurative in representation. And all were, in Johnson’s world, her sisters.

One of her most significant solo exhibitions was at The Black-Art Gallery in Finsbury Park, London, whilst the venue was under the directorship of Marlene Smith.⁹ Its accompanying catalogue featured a fetching portfolio of images of Johnson’s women, an emphatic rebuttal to their perhaps wider marginalisation, objectification and invisibility. When a young Steve McQueen – then a student at Goldsmiths College, going by the name Steven McQueen – reviewed this exhibition, he was palpably animated in his praise for Johnson’s work. McQueen’s feature on Johnson appeared in a ‘grass-roots’ community newspaper, African Peoples Review, which described itself as ‘A Monthly Journal of Reviews of Publications and the Creative Arts of Peoples of African Descent.’ McQueen wrote:

On walking into the Black-Art Gallery in Finsbury Park, London, I was amazed to see images of black women staring at me from all angles – some looking at me, some through me, and some past me. This reminded me of a photograph of my grandfather on the wall of my grandmother’s house when I was a child. Whenever I tried to hide from the glance of my grandfather’s gaze, it always found me! The works one sees in the exhibition, In this Skin, are overwhelmingly arresting. They invite, and envelope the viewer to mediate in the enquiring and exploratory space of Johnson’s immensely imaginative and absorbing mind. Claudette Johnson’s tools are more than just paper and charcoal. What she does is to bring out the soul, sensuality, dignity, and spirituality of the black woman as she crafts away on drawing board, and far beyond.¹⁰

Towards the end of the piece – part of which was an interview McQueen conducted with Johnson – McQueen wrote:

Claudette Johnson’s art is rooted in her African heritage. Her talent is as powerful as it is obvious. We can only guess with delightful anticipation what Johnson has in stock for us all when next her works are exhibited.¹¹

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, there were several practitioners, within a slightly younger generation of Black women artists, for whom Boyce came to act as something of a role model. Mowbray Odonkor was one such artist. A British artist of Ghanaian parentage, she trained at Wimbledon College of Art, London, 1984–7. Her work was exhibited in a number of group exhibitions including the 1991–2 Norwich Gallery touring exhibition History and Identity.¹² Along with other women artists such as Amanda Holiday and Simone Alexander, Mowbray Odonkor seemed destined to follow in and indeed emulate the successes achieved by Sonia Boyce during the 1980s and on into the 1990s. Odonkor’s work was characterised by a singular attachment to highly figurative painting and drawing. For the most part, she took as her subjects the condition of Black women of the diaspora, identity politics, and the legacies of history. To this end, she was responsible for some of the most compelling and articulate paintings and drawings produced by artists during the 1980s.

One of her key pieces, Self-portrait with Red, Gold and Green Flag (c.1988, otherwise known as Onward Christian Soldiers) was acquired by the Arts Council Collection, a reflection of its significance and importance as a prime example of Odonkor’s concerns and artistic style. Time and time again, Odonkor embraced the vehicle of the self-portrait as a means of expressing herself and her ideas. Indeed, even those works which were not, in a direct sense, self-portraits, reflected such a profound empathy on Odonkor’s part for the struggling Black women of the world that they were, to a great extent, very much a part of her body of self-portraiture.

25. Mowbray Odonkor, Self-portrait with Red, Gold and Green Flag (1987).

Odonkor was one of the Seven Painters included in the early 1990s exhibition, History and Identity. She was represented by two drawings; Eeny Meeny Miney Mo, Now You See Me Now You Don’t (c.1988) and the previously mentioned Self Portrait with Red Gold and Green Flag. In Eeny Meeny Miney Mo, Now You See Me Now You Don’t, one of Odonkor’s beloved self-portraits, the artist drew herself not once but six times, each portrait noticeably different from the other five. The composition challenges the viewer to identify the real Mowbray Odonkor: it almost shows her as being six different people. In actuality, the portraits present her in six different ways, or guises, reflecting the extent to which the way Black women style their hair has such a profound effect on how they are perceived and visually evaluated. In this piece of work, Odonkor was attempting to challenge the often biased or prejudicial initial evaluations people make on the basis of the style of hair, mode of dress, etc. of those they encounter. And though certain types of people are more likely than others to be on the receiving end of this tendency to be sized up, it was clear that the work had as much to do with intra-communal hierarchies of appearance as it did with notions of wider societal prejudices. In regard to the latter, there is perhaps more than a playful reference to a children’s rhyme in the title Odonkor has chosen, evoking the N word, as it so ofen does.

Commenting on Eeny Meeny Miney Mo Now You See Me Now You Don’t, Odonkor herself said:

This piece of work addresses stereotypes. Using self-portraiture it addresses the way we are all too often solely judged by our outward appearance. For example the way in which a person styles her hair is often used as a criterion for judgement, resulting in assumptions that can be totally misleading. We need to look further than outward appearances and stop making rash judgements which pigeonhole people through dress. Appearances can be deceptive.¹³

Onward Christian Soldiers stands as a compelling, layered testament to the potency and intricacies of Odonkor’s history and identity. Presented in the manner, perhaps, of the Asafo flags of Ghana, the piece shows the artist standing, arms horizontally extended, in front of a flag of repeated lateral bands of red, gold and green. Perhaps reflective of the Ghanaian flag, the flag is embellished with stars that recall the six pointed Shield of David. Thus within the work Odonkor evokes the distinctly Pan-African, or Diasporic sensibilities of a Black British culture influenced to the nth degree by the sensibilities and the aesthetics of Rastafarianism. In one corner of the flag there is a monochrome drawing of a slave coffle – that is, those manacled and shackled groups of captured African forced to march (often many miles) to the coast or through the desert, shortly after their nightmare of enslavement began. The monochromatic nature of the slavery tableaux contrasts markedly with the colour of the rest of the piece. Directly adjacent to the slavery tableaux Odonkor has placed a Union flag, thereby boldly and directly implicating Britain in the sordid history of the transatlantic slave trade.

Odonkor declared the memory of slavery to be an integral part of her history and identity. Not only that, but the memory of slavery existed, for the artist, as an ongoing affliction, or burden. There were profound overtones of the sacrificial within the piece. With her arms extended as if nailed or bound to an unseen cross, it was almost as if Odonkor has been crucified by slavery. Slavery was her stigmata. Such profound assemblage of ideas, motifs, and symbols is rare, and through this work, Odonkor declared herself to be one of the most important artistic voices to emerge during the 1980s.

Simone Alexander was another British artist who, like Odonkor, trained at art school in London during the mid 1980s. Like her peers, Alexander’s work was characterised by a notable attachment to figurative painting and drawing. For the most part, again like a number of her contemporaries, Alexander took as her subjects the condition of Black women of the diaspora, identity politics, and the legacies of history. To this end, together with artists such as Sonia Boyce, Mowbray Odonkor, and Claudette Johnson, she was responsible for some of the most interesting paintings and drawings of the Black woman, in a multiplicity of guises, personas and contexts, produced by Black women artists themselves during the 1980s.

Time and time again, like other Black women artists before and alongside her, Alexander embraced the vehicle of the self-portrait as a means of expressing herself and her ideas. But she did not merely or simply embrace the self-portrait. She emphatically transformed it into something wholly shorn or void of introspection. Alexander’s self-portraits were dramatic and arresting vehicles for critiquing such things as the male gaze, the objectification of women, and the vacuous and empty-headed world of fashion and perfumery. Similarly, Alexander used the self-portrait to express solidarity with the people of South Africa in their struggle against apartheid. Like Odonkor, even those works of Alexander’s which were not in a direct sense self-portraits reflected such a profound empathy on her part for the struggling Black women of the world, that they were, to a great extent, very much a part of Alexander’s body of self-portraiture.

In this regard, one of Alexander’s most remarkable pieces is Sharpeville, Paris, London, New York (c.1990) in which Alexander subverts the popular mechanism used within the fashion and perfumery worlds to indicate international sophistication and chic, by signifying, as part of their advertisements, the major destinations or international locations where their products have a home and are marketed. Within such adverts, New York – Paris – London – Milano – Tokyo are frequently flagged as glamorous locations, reflective of equally glamorous products with which the purchaser can avail themselves, at least notionally, of said glamour. These are international destinations reflective of the world of Prada, Gucci, Donna Karan and Dolce & Gabbana. Yet in Alexander’s piece, Sharpeville, the South African township, was inserted and repeated in the background of her self-portrait. In March of 1960 the township was the scene of what became known as the Sharpeville Massacre, when South African police began shooting into a crowd of Black protesters. The incident became more than a grim and bloody episode in the struggle against apartheid: it became instead a rallying cry, a renewed focus, for the anti-apartheid struggle, in much the same way as, a decade and a half later, the murder of Steve Biko and the Soweto uprisings would. Within this work, Alexander extends profound empathy to apartheid’s victims and thereby acknowledges another generation of struggle and resistance. Not only that, but she also posits cities such as Paris, London and New York as sites of struggle, alongside Sharpeville.

As for the self-portrait itself, it features Alexander, in faux glamorous pose, sternly but ambiguously returning the gaze and presenting an image of herself on her own terms, an image which is in essence the antithesis of the world of fashion and its obsession with notions of beauty and body type that often verge on the tyrannical. Scattered over the large picture are motifs, or paintings, of roses and rose petals. The flower, deeply symbolic, was used by other Black women artists such as Val Brown, Mowbray Odonkor, and Sonia Boyce as a means of illustrating the specificities of themselves and the Black women of the world. Here, Alexander was similarly attracted to the rose, boldly using it to add humanity, love, and beauty to the stridency of the piece’s messages. Within Sharpeville, Paris, London, New York, the figure of a second Black woman can clearly be seen, departing the frame, or at least, looking out of it. In a text written in 1986, Alexander paid homage to those women of Africa (in this instance, Kenya) for whom frivolities such as what type of perfume to purchase were a world away from their daily hardships of survival: ‘These women were absolute because theirs was a world without superficial values […] because unlike us who have nothing constructive to do with ourselves, for these women there is always the question of survival.’¹⁴

During the 1980s, several Black artists made work in response to rioting that was, in turn, a response to the maiming of one Black woman and the death of another in 1985. Marlene Smith was one of these artists. She produced a sobering, nuanced and deeply empathetic work called Bless This House (c.1986) in recognition of the horrific injuries sustained by a Black woman named Cherry Groce. On Saturday 28 September 1985, Mrs Groce was shot during a police raid on her home in London and was subsequently paralysed. Groce was allegedly shot in her bed by a member of a team of armed police officers who were looking for her son. Another, divergent account, has it that

a team of armed officers went to the home of Mrs Cherry Groce in Brixton, South London, to arrest her son, Michael, who was wanted for [allegations of] armed robbery. In fact, Michael Groce, no longer lived there. The officers smashed down the door with a sledge-hammer and then an inspector rushed in shouting “armed police”. Mrs Groce says the officer suddenly rushed at her, pointing a gun at her. She tried to run back but he shot her. She is now paralysed and confined to a wheelchair.¹⁵

Groce’s maiming sparked rioting in the vicinity of Brixton, a district of South London which had witnessed extensive rioting four years earlier, in 1981. The sense of Black Britain being a community under siege and on the unanswered receiving end of casual but deadly state-sanctioned violence was further heightened within a matter of days of Groce’s injuries being sustained. On Sunday 6 October 1985, just over a week after Groce sustained her horrific injuries, another Black woman, Mrs Cynthia Jarrett died of a heart attack during a police search of her Tottenham home.¹⁶ (Again, it was allegations against her son that lay at the centre of this police action.) During this period of the mid 1980s, there were many other such personal tragedies that ultimately spoke of the Black-British presence being somewhat fractious or ill at ease. It was during the ‘rioting’ on the Broadwater Farm estate, sparked by news of Mrs Jarrett’s death, that PC Blakelock was isolated from his fellow police officers and set upon and killed by what was commonly referred to at the time, by the press and media, as a ‘mob’.¹⁷ In keeping with the times, there was much about Black artists’ practice during the 1980s that inculcated and declared multiple senses of opposition, alienation and protest.

Bless This House was the title of a long-running British sitcom of the 1970s. There was, though, nothing remotely comical about Smith’s piece, a multimedia work that depicted a robed Black woman, in the unsuspecting comfort of her own home. The woman – rendered in three dimensions – stands in front of a family photograph that hangs on the wall behind her. The framed photograph is typical of any given number of such photographs in households throughout the land, depicting as it does a group of Black people, including youngsters, at a party or celebration, such as a wedding reception. Within the deceptively frugal construction, Smith evokes the sort of domestic stability that emanates, almost as a matter of routine, from households that bore witness to the presence of matriarchal figures such as Cherry Groce. It was this somewhat comforting sense of domestic stability that was so violently intruded upon on that fateful morning in September 1985. The work is made within and across the space where two boards of wall met, positioned at an angle, as if to suggest a corner. This sense of Groce, and indeed the family members depicted in the photograph, being almost literally cornered is a device that adds further substance to this grave and weighty piece of work. Across the corners of the assemblage, Smith has written on the walls, in capital letters: ‘MY MOTHER OPENS THE DOOR AT 7 A.M. SHE IS NOT BULLETPROOF’.

Another artist of great importance to emerge during the course of the 1980s was Sutapa Biswas, born in India but who had lived in Britain since a young age. Like many of her contemporaries, Biswas was university trained, having studied at the University of Leeds from 1981 to 1985, at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1988 to 1990, and at the Royal College of Art between 1996 and 1998. She became a regular contributor to a number of the important exhibitions of women’s work that took place during the 1980s. Her work at the time revealed Biswas to be a singular and most original artist. In her paintings and drawings she fused decidedly contemporary manifestations of her identity as a young, British-Asian woman with compelling aspects of her cultural heritage. Biswas’ astonishing work of the 1980s boldly challenged, head on, stereotypes of Indian women as demure and submissive whilst this work, simultaneously, unapologetically investigated and recalled, with great clarity, aspects of religious and cultural identity evocative of Biswas’ ancestral home of India. Typical in this regard is one of Biswas’ most powerful works of the decade, Housewives with Steak-Knives (1985).¹⁸

In the mixed media painting, Biswas depicts a young Asian woman –herself perhaps – in the form of the deity Kali, the very recognisable and somewhat terrifying Hindu goddess associated with empowerment. Reflective of the multiple resonances of traditional images of Kali, her persona is also associated with darkness, time, and death; hence her perennial depiction as evoking that which is dark and violent. Kali – instantly recognisable by her multi-limbed upper torso – is traditionally depicted as an annihilator of evil forces, a retributive vanquisher of wrongdoers, who holds in her several hands not only the tools of annihilation such as knives and other weapons, but also the severed heads of her victims. Kali is also frequently depicted as wearing around her neck a garland of the reduced heads of those she has, literally, put to the sword. Biswas’ painting was no less terrifying and awe-inspiring. Her Kali, however, wears a sleeveless summer patterned frock, or top; red, with decorative diamonds shapes. Like traditional depictions of Kali, the whites of her eyes signify retributive intent, as does her tongue, which protrudes violently from her mouth. Lest there be any doubts as to the extent to which this modern embodiment is at polar opposites to the media-stoked stereotypes of Asian feminine submission, this particular modern-day Kali has the hairiest of armpits, an emphatic rebuttal of the grooming seemingly imposed on women and symptomatic of the ways in which they are expected to do battle with their own bodies, by the vigilant removal of under-arm body hair.

26. Sutapa Biswas, Housewives with Steak Knives (1985).

All four hands of the avenging goddess are stained with the red blood of her slain foes. One hand holds a fearsome, somewhat oversized steak knife, itself bearing evidence of the carnage it recently inflicted. Another hand holds the decapitated head of one of her victims, whilst around her neck hangs a ghoulish, bloody garland of heads – those of white males, here cast as her vanquished tormentors. The fourth hand holds what are perhaps the most intriguing of objects. A red rose, or some such flower, and a small flag on a stick. The flag bears images reflective of Biswas’ art historical training, and her resulting keen awareness of the ways in which paintings and images can be read. Within the flag’s depiction of Artemisia Gentileschi’s version of Judith Beheading Holofernes (a reddened photocopy of the work, in miniature) Biswas invites the viewer to consider connections between the Hebrew heroine, Judith, the Goddess Kali, and Biswas herself, and the ways in which they are each here presented as wrestling with and indeed conquering their respective gendered tormentors. Housewives with Steak-Knives was intended to be hung in an elevated position, with the top of the painting significantly away from the wall, thereby creating, or intensifying, a sense of dread in the viewer who, having been placed in an obligatory position of deference and respect, had no choice but to literally look up to the painting and its fearful depiction.

Much like Boyce’s practice, Biswas’s work began to change markedly. She began to move away from her distinctive paintings and drawings, which often celebrated the political struggles of Asian women and Asian communities in Britain, towards ways of working that utilised photography and other media, largely reflective of contemporary art practices of the 1990s.

Meanwhile, another group of artists were using sculpture to explore ideas and concerns that, on occasion, echoed the considerations framed by Boyce, Biswas and their contemporaries.