Raquel Villar-Pérez [C&AL]: Tell me about what drove you to become an artist, and also the reasons for your choice of mediums.

Alberta Whittle: I’ve always felt driven to be an artist. I am very lucky to have very supportive parents who also went to art school. My dad is an artist and we have collaborated a number of times. I have fibromyalgia and I was diagnosed as I was a child. Often I spent time in my room drawing, painting, making collages. In some ways I feel like as if I am still looping back to some of the ideas that I was working on when I was on my own in my bedroom.

My work draws across different media: performance, workshops, artist talks, as well as more static compositions, which are my digital collages. The choice of medium comes from a particular idea or concept that I’m trying to work through. I come from a background of drawing and behind my final work there are a lot of developmental drawings. Collage is a form that is linked to my drawings and it permeates across my practice, especially in my film and my digital collage work, even in my performances, where I piece together different layered images.



Right of Admission, 2014 - to date. Image courtesy of the artist.

RVP: Your work address hurtful notions of colonial history, colonial legacies, and remembrance, in order to create awareness and prompt dialogues about collective healing and reparations. Can you expand on what do you mean by collective healing and reparations?

AW: What I pursue within my artistic work and also within my curatorial practice is the hope for meaningful conversations, where we can come together, listen, and share openly. We need to enter into a state of collective listening, which hopefully will lead to moments of healing. There is need for a long commitment to that process, and it seems that it is only now that we are starting to deal with these concerns. In terms of recognition of how crucial radical listening can be in working through uncomfortable issues, in particular reparatory justice, Niv Acosta’s work on resting as a form of resistance, has been influential for me. Niv suggests that healing can be achieved through taking time for ‘black power naps’, that is for black bodies to make time to prioritise rest, since they have historically always been pressured into a dynamic of over-production and of excessive labour. Contravening in this racialised expectations for black labour has become a big concern within my practice: how do I create more networks for mutual care, how do I make sure that our interactions with each other are more compassionate, as well as critical, because I think there is real care in allowing ourselves to imagine our own futurity along compassion.

Sorry Not Sorry, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.

RVP: Can you expand on how does your origin, upbringing and ancestors inform and nourish your work?

AW: I’ll tell you two stories. The first story is that my parents had a membership for the Barbados Museum & Historical Society, so as a child we would go there often. I remember being in one of the rooms, and there was a family of British tourists. Their two sons kept asking ‘why do we have to come here, why do we have to look at this history, it has nothing to do with me.’ The second story is that shortly after I arrived to the UK as a child, Steven Lawrence was murdered. 

These two instances happened within a year of each other and they had a big impact on me. The first story made me realise that there is a sense of alienation and ambivalence from Britain towards the brutal history between Europe and the Caribbean, and this relationship represented in the Museum in Barbados was perceived by this family as having nothing to do with them and that neither slavery, nor colonialism and even the lives of black people had nothing to do with their everyday. When I moved to the UK, I realised that there was no knowledge, no history being taught about what happened during the British Empire in the Caribbean, or in the Commonwealth; I found that quite frightening. I realised that my life and my history was so unimportant in the UK. 

With the loss of Steven Lawrence and a system that supported the erasure of his life, I learnt that black lives and black death meant nothing. A lot of the reasons why I make my work are a response to the terror that my life may not matter, and that my history is disposable. 

between a whisper and a cry, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.

RVP: What are your strategies to make past stories/histories relatable to the present day?

AW: I think past and present stories are interrelated. If you look at the speech by David Lammy in my piece ‘Sorry, not sorry’, he is talking about events that happened three hundred years ago and insisting that they are connected to how we understand our conditions today. If you look at the untold story of the Windrush generation that is just now being revealed by the press, we discover how the British Government had not fully prepared for these Caribbean British citizens to come to the UK nor did they welcome them . The British Nationality Act was not for black or POC people; it was for white people wanting to be able to move more easily across the Commonwealth. All this is connected to how we understand the Other and how the Other is read, which is related to histories of colonialism and slavery. This significantly impacts the ways certain bodies and certain histories are consistently rendered disposable. 

RVP: Do you know of any art events in the Caribbean that help shaping up a ‘Caribbean art scene’? What do you think is the role of Barbadian artists within this Caribbean art scene? 

AW: There are a lot of initiatives happening in the Caribbean at the moment. I am particularly aware of the ones in the Anglophone Caribbean. For instance, Alice Yard initiated by Chris Cozier, Nicholas Laughlin and Sean Leonard in Trinidad has been really important in terms of providing space, time, conversation and support for artists to come together for research and making; Fresh Milk in Barbados, founded by Annalee Davis has grown into a crucial entity for fostering conversations across the Diaspora between local and international artists. Annalee alongside Holly Bynoe created the Tilting Axis research project, which is a moveable conversation and gathering that travels with the intention of opening up networks. It started off in Barbados at Annalee’s art space Fresh Milk Inc, and moved to other art institutions connected to the Caribbean, including the Perez Art Museum in Miami, National Art Gallery of the Bahamas and for its fifth Tilting Axis gathering, this year this year it was at Memorial ACTe in Guadeloupe.

There have been other movements such as Carifesta, which began in the early 1980s and travels across the Caribbean every two years, although there have been a few times that it has been delayed because of lack of money or environmental issues such as hurricanes, so the island wasn’t able to host it. These gatherings span everything within Caribbean creativity, from dance and performance, to visual arts, crafts, and literature. The purpose of these gatherings has been really useful in terms of bringing artists, researchers and makers that wouldn’t necessarily get to come together and share their work and findings. So they are very important for people to network.

Alberta Whittle, between a whisper and a cry. Image courtesy of the artist.

RVP: Is there a sense of Caribbean artist identity?

AW: Yes definitely, the depth and sprawl of important research that has been happening in the Caribbean has been gaining greater traction internationally and we are beginning to see real support from international museums such as the Tate Britain presenting a long overdue show of Frank Bowling or the recent show of diasporan Caribbean artists at the Perez Museum and Hew Locke’s superb solo at the Ikon. 

I am on the Committee of Transmission Gallery in Glasgow and we along with the British Council jointly supported the Caribbean Queer Visualities exhibition. Caribbean Queer Visualities was a Small Axe project initiated between David Scott and Erica James; which brought together artists living in the Caribbean and from across the Diaspora specifically looking at queerness and non-conformity in the Caribbean. 

There is obviously a lot more support; especially financial patronage for artists living outside of the Caribbean so the negative Diaspora is real. If there is an opportunity abroad, most artists will probably take the chance to be elsewhere; however, there are people making big commitments to stay and work locally, which I think is laudable.

RVP: What are your future plans?

AW: Actually they are quite exciting! I have a solo exhibition opening on the 13 September at Dundee Contemporary Arts. It is a very large gallery space, so there is capacity to develop a very ambitious project. On October 17 I am part of a two-person show at Edinburgh Printmakers, which has opened up possibilities for me to develop my skills in printmaking. And in November I’ll have a solo presentation at LUX in London. For all of these projects I am working on fresh bodies of work, so it is a very busy and generative time for me! 

For more information on Alberta's work, please visit www.albertawhittle.com