Ashley Holmes: We Came The Long Way, And I Thought You Knew

About

This new body of work continues ongoing work and research into the poetic, political and experimental investigations of music from Jamaica and African diaspora. The work explores the ways cultural production can facilitate the intersection of different types of knowledge and geographies, allowing us to see how Black music is necessary to re-imagining the materiality of space.  

As a point of departure, the work attempts to the foreground and delve into the soundings, singing and songs of Dub music and the sonic metaphor of the abyss within the genre, as a means of exploring corporeality, collective memory and experimenting with distance, scale, silence and space. These forms of dub processing and imaging making are used throughout the connecting stairways at QUAD to conjure up interpretations of African Diasporic historic memory of displacement and bridge the disconnect between metaphysical genealogy and a way of being British, and of Caribbean heritage.  

This exhibition is supported by funding from Arts Council England.