Artist working between the UK and the Bahamas.
The idea of positioning: geographically, within a hierarchy, within a system, within your self; is an underlying idea that I explore within my practice. Concerned with cultural and post-colonial identity, I investigate my own interstitial position in life and use my practice as a vehicle to negotiate how my mixed Bahamian and British heritage informs the personal situating of my self. I draw upon shared and personal histories, as well as notions of cultural memory, Otherness, and translation in conjunction with a make/shift aesthetic to create work that is nomadic and encourages ideas of mobility.
I work at understanding the potential for how non-Western cultures can be represented within a gallery setting, given the weight of its Western history. Do Others have to adopt Western contemporary art visual signifiers to be understood within the West? To be made ‘palatable’ to Western tastes? … Or should there be a different aesthetic altogether?
NatalieWillis 