CHAPTER ELEVEN

Substantial Sculpture: The work of
Sokari Douglas Camp, Veronica Ryan,
and Permindar Kaur.

Alongside those Black women artists emerging during and following the 1980s whose practice reflected a range of explicit social narratives were other Black women artists whose practices reflected other concerns. The work of these artists was, interestingly, primarily sculptural, and ranged from investigations into shapes and forms evocative of the natural world and the sculptural qualities of materials, through to work that reflected notions of cultural heritage, with a similar and attendant interest in the sculptural qualities of materials. One of the most prolific sculptors to emerge during the 1980s, working at the same time as Lubaina Himid, Sonia Boyce and their contemporaries, was Sokari Douglas Camp. Born in Rivers State, Nigeria in the late 1950s, Douglas Camp was educated at California College of Arts and Crafts, Central School of Art and Design, London (from where she obtained a First Class Honours degree, as Keith Piper was to do in the same year). Like Piper, Douglas Camp went on to graduate from the Royal College of Art in the mid 1980s.

Reflective of the complexities and enigmatic singularity of her work, Douglas Camp was cast, by alternating degrees, as either a Nigerian/African artist, or as a late twentieth century artist, making a new and decidedly different kind of work. In reality, her work occupied its own particular aesthetic and sculptural space, a space in which the different elements of her upbringing and art school training merged, with often dramatic results. Douglas Camp came to be known and celebrated for the pronounced sculptural qualities of her work and the ways in which the work often challenged gendered perceptions of what a woman sculptor could produce. Her creations were often large, oversize and decidedly strange figures, made of welded shapes, strips, and other pieces of metal. Alongside her figures, which often evoked the substantial frames of formidable African matriarchs and other women, Douglas Camp also created wonderful boat-like structures and other strange constructions. Her sculpture often related to masquerades and festivals evocative of certain parts of her native Nigeria. It was perhaps this type of work that critics and curators most easily latched onto. But Douglas Camp’s sculptures also resonated with investigations into form, shape, space and balance, sometimes with aural dimensions. In this regard, work regarded as being culturally specific or culturally evocative took its place alongside very different types of sculpture, equally culturally nuanced, but in very different ways.

A measure of the formidable constraints, and indeed prejudices, brought to bear on Black artists was evidenced in an interview with Douglas Camp that appeared as one of her exhibition brochures in 1988. The interviewer begins by asking, ‘How do you feel about being regarded as a black artist?’¹ Nothing within Douglas Camp’s own pronouncements suggested that she was wedded to any sort of inevitable prefix to her identity as an artist. And yet the interviewer, like so many others cut from the same cloth, chose not to frame Douglas Camp as an artist making her own dramatic contributions to late twentieth century contemporary sculpture, but (in this instance) as ‘a black artist’, a cramped and somewhat uninspiring tag. To be sure, other practitioners of the period advanced textured, socially assertive identities as Black artists, but Douglas Camp most assuredly was not amongst them. The tendency to collapse a broad range of art practices and positions into the monolithic construct of the ‘black artist’ was reflected not only in the interviewer’s opening question, but also in a number of the large-scale group exhibitions that dominated during this period. By the summer of 1988 Douglas Camp was being regarded as ‘a young artist who has already achieved considerable critical acclaim’ and, further, that she ‘must be acknowledged as one of the most exciting sculptors working in Britain today.’²

27. Sokari Douglas Camp. Iriabo (Woman and child) (1987).

Her return visits to the Niger Delta have provided a constant source of inspiration for her work, through which she seeks to re-invent Kalabari Culture, specifically the movement, vitality and spiritual significance of its masquerades at Festival Time (Alali). Whilst not offering a literal representation of the masquerades, the sculptures incorporate recognisable elements from them, realised with great formal ingenuity and employing a range of materials and processes, an approach which owes much to Western sculptural conventions. Drawing on and fusing these distinct cultural traditions – one African and one Western – Sokari Douglas Camp’s work succeeds however in operating independently as a unique sculptural expression, which we hope will reach a wider audience through this exhibition.³

Douglas Camp made the most arresting of sculptures. Sometimes, her work was kinetic; her strange welded steel mannequins, when made to ‘play’ metal instruments, created a discordant but dramatic metal-on-metal rhythm. At other times, her imposing metal figures stood silent, and once encountered by audiences could not be ignored. Like several other celebrated female sculptors of the twentieth century, Douglas Camp challenged the dominant perceptions of what work such an artist might be expected to make. But welding pieces and shapes of metal, to create figures with a powerful sense of gravitas, was something that Douglas Camp did, almost as a matter of course. Time and again, however, a somewhat hackneyed notion was employed to introduce her work. Another critic equating Africa with the past and Europe with the present, wrote:

Although she received her artistic training in California and London, her work is not that of an artist alienated from her culture. Coming as she does from Nigeria, with its rich sculptural tradition, she has been inspired by the art of her ancestors without being overwhelmed by it as so many modern African sculptors have been, with the result that their work is at best derivative, at worst purely imitative, Sokari Douglas Camp straddles the cultural divide between past and present, Africa and Europe, with apparent ease. As this present combined exhibition of her sculpture and the Kalabari masquerades, Sekiapu, which have provided inspiration for so much of her work, so clearly demonstrates.⁴

Though Douglas Camp may have bridled against the West versus Africa or Europe versus Africa amalgamation that her work was said, by critics, to reflect, the critics themselves found it hard to write their texts on her without reference to these types of dichotomies and amalgamations. In 1990 Douglas Camp made a series of near-theatrical carts that would be rickety, or should be rickety, were it not for the decidedly structurally solid materials with which these comic, playful, yet quite grounded or anchored contraptions of movement were constructed. Furthermore, this sense of the playful consistently manifested itself in her imposing figure sculptures, which ranged from depictions of regular people out shopping through to wonderful masqueraders, evocative of her native Nigeria. The materials from which such works were created gave these figures a profound sense of grounding, and of self. For example, Rose & Vi (1993), a representation of two women out shopping, complete with trolley for their groceries, was constructed of steel and copper. Douglas Camp was however not averse to introducing the lightest of materials into her figure sculptures, almost as if to emphasise a sense of contrasting materiality. Consider, in this regard, Big Masquerade with boat and household on his head (1995), which was constructed from steel, wood and feathers. Big Masquerade was in its own ways wonderfully reminiscent of the effigy of Joseph Johnson, discussed in the Preface to this book.

Another, but decidedly different sculptor who emerged into notable visibility and prominence during the 1980s was Veronica Ryan, who was born in Montserrat, in the Caribbean. She availed herself of opportunities to study at various institutions, including Bath Academy of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art and the School of Oriental and African Studies. The 1980s was a particularly fertile decade for Ryan, who had a number of prestigious exhibitions of her work at venues such as Riverside Studios, London (19 October – 13 November 1988) and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (19 November – 8 January 1989). Veronica Ryan is best known for her sculpture that is evocative of shapes, forms and objects from the natural world, giving her work a distinct sense of the organic. Ryan’s work has made its way into a number of important collections of British art, making her one of the most important sculptors of her generation.

Her sculptures often sat on the gallery floor, or positioned at ground level outdoors. In a number of instances, this placing emphasised the association of her work to natural forms, literally growing up from or at ground level, as well as hinting at domesticated or other beasts that eat from ground level troughs. Typical in this regard was Ryan’s work of 1988, simply titled Trough. Made from cast bronze, the work resembled a farmyard trough, made from a very soft metal that had grown misshapen through many years of use, but was nevertheless holding its shape. A certain sense of vulnerability and fragility in Ryan’s work was offset by the decidedly weighty materials she used in the making of work such as Trough. In turn, this unmistakeable sense of solidity and physical presence was offset by the use of such things as dried flowers, again (and perhaps self-evidently) evocative of plant life and the natural world. The two compartments of Trough were generously filled with still-beautiful remnants of desiccated flowers, which though long dead, resonated with a sense of bounty, and a dreadful exquisiteness and splendour. Such was the sense of things living, things growing, things dying, and things being preserved, that Ryan’s work evoked.

Veronica Ryan’s works, comprised of [sic] seed-like forms, also evoke a sense of location, dislocation and dispersal, through metaphysical allusions to birth, death and decay. Ryan’s enigmatic forms, scattered like seeds, appear frozen in transitional states of development amongst landscapes offering sustenance and potential fruition, as seen in her sculpture Territorial (1986).⁵

The work in question, here described by Mora Beauchamp-Byrd (and contained in the Arts Council Collection), resembled a terrible but fascinating mutant form of vegetation resonating with those plants capable of inflicting damage and death on its hapless victims. Again, despite the solidity of the materials used to make the work (in this instance, plaster and bronze), Territorial resembled nothing so much as a giant vegetative land mine, capable of devouring anything that flew too close, or came too close. The work did indeed conjure up notions of the territorial, with the sculpture’s triffid-like qualities.

A particularly successful work of public art executed by Ryan was a work called Boundaries (c.1985). In its title, and in other respects, it echoed Territories. Located in a relatively remote grassy area of Peterborough Sculpture Park, this pair of sculptures created an intriguing relationship with the wider surroundings. Set within concrete ground-level plinths, the work had a remarkable ability to evoke decidedly different things to different people, depending on which angle it was viewed from, what distance it was viewed from, and the prevailing light or weather conditions at that particular moment. Not only that, but as with other such pieces of work in the open air, the metal of which Boundaries was made gradually altered its appearance in response to the attention it received from the sun and the rain, the frost and the dew, the wind and the snow. Metal thieves stole the work in early January of 2012

On occasion during the 1980s, when Ryan exhibited in the company of other Black women artists, her work would be cast by critics as contrasting favourably with the perceived or apparent strident tone of the other exhibited work.⁶ Ryan was one of the 11 artists in Lubaina Himid’s The Thin Black Line exhibition. Whilst the other ten artists had their work displayed in the corridor area and stairwell within the ICA, Ryan’s sculpture was displayed in a separate, upstairs room in the building. Reviewing the exhibition, the Guardian art critic pointed to the ‘gentle sadness which emerges in the splendid sculpture of Veronica Ryan’.⁷ Januszczak discerned a particularly contemplative aspect of Ryan’s work that did indeed resonate with a sense of melancholy, rupture, and sense of self. In this regard, he was particularly prescient, as in years to come, Ryan was to make more work that resonated with particular sentiments of loss, yearning and remembrance.

Writing in the From Two Worlds catalogue, Adeola Solanke made mention of Ryan’s sculptures as

sculptural forms which convey a still, unhurried and yet insistent being. Her forms have a characteristic aura which is conducive to and induces a feeling of contented being. Pillows and pods with undulating surfaces in which various smaller forms rest; pods with compartments which act as home to a family of smaller creations. These suggest a completeness and peace like that of a foetus in a welcoming womb.⁸

These were perceptive comments by Solanke, who also reported in the same text that Ryan ‘insists her work is figurative, not abstract, but has the qualities that incorporate both modes of reflecting on reality.’ Ultimately however, it was Stella Santacatterina who provided possibly the safest judgement on Ryan’s work when she suggested that ‘To look for absolute concepts capable of embracing Veronica Ryan’s works is a difficult, if not impossible task.’⁹

Ryan created work using a variety of materials, in a number of different locations, sometimes working as a result of a residency. In addition to the work in the Arts Council Collection referenced previously, she also had worked acquired for the Tate Collection: Quoit Montserrat (1998) and Mango Reliquary (2000). It was from the former piece in particular that a ‘gentle sadness’ could be seen to emerge. The piece was in some respects a memoriam for Ryan’s native Montserrat, which had recently been traumatised by a volcanic eruption.

Like a number of Black artists, for example Frank Bowling and Francis Newton Souza, Ryan moved to New York at the beginning of the 1990s, to an environment perhaps more suited to what artists such as these had to offer. Other artists similarly moved to the US, for example Donald Locke and Winston Branch lived in Atlanta and the San Francisco Bay Area, respectively.

Although of a slightly younger generation (having been born in Nottingham in 1965), Permindar Kaur is another British sculptor of substantial repute. Of South Asian origin, she was born to Punjabi parents in Nottingham and emerged into visibility and practice during the course of the 1990s. She is a sculptor whose work has been featured in a significant number of solo and group exhibitions both at home and internationally. Her practice was characterised by an enigmatic use of materials, scale, and symbolism. Despite its considerable ambiguity of meaning, highly charged cultural and religious symbolism has often been a feature of Kaur’s work. In 1991 she made a community of miniature, but sizeable transparent plate glass houses for the exhibition Four x 4 at the Arnolfini in Bristol.¹⁰ The houses were filled with handmade clay domestic implements, cultural objects and religious symbols, by far the most potent of which was the Khanda, the emblem of the Sikhs that is such an instantly recognisable symbol adorning the Gurdwara, the Sikh place of worship. In the mid 1990s, Kaur’s contributions to The British Art Show included Innocence (1993), a religiously specific piece of work consisting of a child’s dress made of a rich orange-coloured material – the same coloured material that swathes Gurdwara flagpoles, crowned with the Khanda. Tucked into a sash, draped across the dress, is a khanda or khanja, a double-edged sword that often symbolises the kirpan, one of the five K’s of the Sikh religion.

For Kaur, who secured her MA from Glasgow School of Art, such symbolism took its place alongside other equally dramatic devices and elements central to her sculpture. Perhaps the most consistent dramatic device employed by Kaur has been her extraordinary use of scale. For the 1990 self-portrait exhibition, Let the Canvas Come to Life With Dark Faces,¹¹ Kaur made a large oversize head, well over two metres high. The head was made from short metal rods, painstakingly welded together to form a work that successfully referenced the artist’s own distinctive facial features. Successful work on such a scale, requiring as it did copious amounts of patience and technical expertise, is rare indeed. But the head was also a cage-like construction, packed with brightly coloured wooden objects that resembled children’s toys. Disconcertingly, the artist had put attractive and innocent objects within what was in effect a caged structure, notwithstanding the structure’s representation, in such a painstaking way, of Kaur’s own face and head. Throughout much of her practice, Kaur has continued to be fascinated with what might be regarded as disturbing and unsettling questions.

One of Kaur’s most substantial British exhibitions was Cold Comfort, in in which her ongoing interest in questions of scale was abundantly apparent.¹² The centrepiece of the exhibition was a work of three steel-framed beds, constructed to stand high above the viewer. Each bed came complete with attached ladders, enabling viewers to imagine themselves literally ‘climbing into bed’. Elsewhere in the exhibition, a pair of chairs similarly dwarfed the viewer. Perhaps one of the most disconcerting things about these particular pieces was that they did not necessarily look like the eccentric or slightly odd creations of an artist. They were polished, highly finished pieces of furniture that had a showroom-like quality, making them all the more unnerving.

Permindar Kaur’s work continued to be enigmatic; time and again critics and curators picked up on Kaur’s ability to use distinct and particular materials such as glass and steel to make work that resonated with no end of associations. That much, at least, was clear to Mora Beauchamp-Byrd, who wrote:

Nationality – the concept of belonging to a country or an actual geographical space – is a subject addressed by many of Britain’s contemporary artists. Permindar Kaur’s installation Arrival (1991), metaphorically references the transmission and shifting nature of ides and culture. Sheets of glass, set atop tall metal rods with arrow-like points at the bottom, stand positioned at various points along the installation floor. Their points form map-like configurations, charting geographical points of residence and transitory movement as well as cultural reference points.¹³

Alongside personal or domestic narratives, Kaur’s sculpture contained much in the way of references to Sikh/Indian identity and culture. Like Sokari Douglas Camp before her, Kaur was also vulnerable to the suggestion that her work ‘is a synthesis of the different cultural experiences that she is simultaneously immersed in. […] She may think of herself as both an Indian and a British woman’.¹⁴ In many ways, a more plausible reading of Kaur’s work would acknowledge that all sorts of ‘cultural’ influences (if one can determinedly speak of such things) are discernible within her work. As to what, if any, national identity (again, if one can determinedly speak of such things) she subscribes to, her audiences do not know, because, very simply, she has not told them – either through her sculpture or by other means.

Like several other artists referenced in this book, Kaur was able to wrestle herself free of the sometimes constraining ways in which she was regarded and her work perceived, simply by relocating to another country – in her case, to Spain, and Barcelona, in the early 1990s. Though the writers of the following text were somehow able to conjoin British-born Kaur to ‘non-Western artists’, they nevertheless offered a useful summary of the benefits of Kaur’s temporary international relocation.

On completing her MA in 1992 she spent several years in Barcelona. This presented her with more cultural and aesthetic complications in her daily life – another language, another culture, another place to get to know. The experience has been a positive force in her work.

28. Permindar Kaur, Innocence (1993).

Working in Britain the artist felt a pressure to make work referring specifically to her Indian culture, and the struggles that many non-Western artists face, when working in this country.

One of the many foreign artists in Barcelona, she felt that these expectations were lifted and her work began to develop in other directions. As a result Kaur has felt freer to make more emotional work and experiment with various themes.¹⁵

Permindar Kaur was one of a relatively select number of British artists of African or Asian origin to be included in The British Art Show, the National Touring Exhibition organised every five years by the Hayward Gallery for Arts Council England, which sets out to survey British art. It was The British Art Show 4, of 1995/1996 that included Kaur’s Innocence.

Art critic Richard Cork, writing in The British Art Show catalogue, discussed Kaur’s work in the following terms:

Remembrance of childhood fuels the art of Permindar Kaur, but these recollections have the capacity to haunt it as well. Her finest work seems to have been made by a woman who ruminates, time and again, on the insecurities in a child’s mind. The objects she produces often resemble toys and they are notable for their vulnerability. There is nothing playful about them. Rather do they appear ominous, as if gifted with the power to foresee the future. In Untitled (1995), a costume made of green fabric dangles from the wall. Its legs terminate in copper boots, while an equally burnished crown beaten from the same material caps the head. But the costume remains empty. Loose folds run down its surface and the owner’s absence seems fateful. Although it could simply be an item in a child’s dressing-up cupboard, this inert form also says something about the ultimate futility of an adult’s lust for aggrandisement.¹⁶

Kaur’s work relentlessly played on feelings of vulnerability, and effectively questioned societal attitudes towards childhood and adulthood. A particularly revealing comment by Kaur appeared in an interview Claire Doherty conducted with her. Kaur commented:

When I take part in discussions or give talks [about my work], I find that the audience want to know more about the personal nature of the work, but to do this they have to reveal something of themselves, which they are far more reluctant to do. The fact that the work can be intimate while at the same time reticent is unnerving.¹⁷

The complex tensions that Kaur alluded to in this statement were similarly present in the work of a range of practitioners who emerged during the course of the 1990s.