People and Stuff: A Subversive Collaboration (2023-2025)

A Subversive Collaboration: People and Stuff

site-specific painting, participatory, socially-engaged painting practice
2023-2025 and ongoing
museum of archaeology and anthropology | university of cambridge

Artist Statement
My aim for ‘A Subversive Collaboration’ is to create a visual language for complex relationships between people, our pasts, our present, and the history of our material culture. I want to be able to ‘map’ relationships between places, people and things across time and space.

A Subversive Collaboration is located around the existing ‘world archaeology’ display in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

It is extremely difficult to photograph because of the scale, which is approximately 3m x 50m, so I will describe it here.
I have added to the wall schematic birds eye views of the landscapes where the objects come from: eg the Pacific region around Torres Strait (between Australia and New Guinea), Mexico-Guatamala-Nicaragua-Costa Rica (the area of the Mayans), Britain and Europe (the area of the Romans), Nigeria (the site where the Benin bronzes and other artefacts were looted in a punitive war) etc

The landscapes are there to try to put the collections back into their physical context. On top of these, there is graffiti – tags and images by museum staff, volunteers, and communities. The reason for the graffiti is because graffiti is the language of free expression. No one is censored. The same is true for this project, even though not everyone likes it, not everyone agrees with what has been written and drawn.

Together the graffiti embodies historical and contemporary connections to the objects and the places where the objects came from. For some, this is highly controversial. Some prefer the apparent neutrality of white walls. I beg to disagree – white walls are not neutral. They never were. They deny existing relationships to the past and our material culture from across the world, here for historical and contemporary colonial reasons.

Working with
Archaeologist – Jimena Lobo Guerrero Arenas
Educationalist and archaeologist – Sarah-Jane Harknett
And volunteers, staff and visitors to the museum

Supported through Arts and Humanities Research Council Impact Accelerator Grant and Royal College of Art grant