Three visual artists Pauline Bailey, Joyce Treasure and Ola Brown have been involved in a collaborative artist residency to explore the Lapworth Museum's collection of fossils, rocks and minerals.
They responded to specific items or themes in Lapworth's vast collection, and this exhibition shares installations the three artists have made in response to their brief explorations. This pilot is produced and curated in partnership between the Black Arts Forum and the Lapworth Museum of Geology.
Exhibition dates
1 April - 31 August 2022
Lapworth Museum of Geology
University of Birmingham
B15 2TT
INTIMATE XENOLITH
Skeleton leaves, wool, synthetic hair, mycelium packaging, text, sugar starch and cowrie shells.
Soundscape
67cm height
34cm width
17cm depth
INTIMATE XENOLITH asks,
Can we study the success of natural science, like a planetary oracle, to grasp how social science can proceed? Intimate Xenolith is a soundscape installation piece combining mythology, ritual, and geology to form a speculative ancestral narrative around healing.
Intimate Xenolith written by Joyce Treasure orated by RED MEDUSA.
RED MEDUSA is an established spoken word artist and scholar who combines her learnings from her experiences as a Black, neurodiverse, educated, working-class woman and mother with her academic knowledge of health and social inequalities to deliver moving, visceral and disruptive poetry. Grounded in Black feminist theory, her exciting works have led to headlines at the famous Southbank Centre in London, the infamous She Grrrowls Festival, The Million Woman Rise March and published in Vogue and Forbes Magazines.
The Dancer by Joyce Treasure responds to Kumo's album, inspired by dance rhythms, titled Slave Dances (Seven Portraits).
Full colour 52-page A5 zine companion to the album:
”An essential accompaniment to the album, indeed a brilliantly educational document in its own right, is a full colour 52-page A5 zine, featuring soberly beguiling artwork by Joyce Treasure and superb design by Dan Taylor. Here, Kumo explains in detail how he sourced, researched and put together these pieces, his recording methods and motivations in making the album. There is additional text also from Treasure, an essay based around her cover image The Dancer, in which she lays bare the insidious processes of cultural and mental colonisation which deprive both blacks and whites of true consciousness.” David Stubbs
Black Bottom (James Stinson) Video by @Francesca Bonci