PRESENCE

About

Robinson’s installation, PLASTICISED SENSATION, on view at the ICA as part of The Politics of Pleasure from 3rd to 8th September, investigates the emotional implications of presence for gendered and racialised bodies. Robinson’s next body of work will explore the ways in which the bodies of women of colour have been rendered visible/invisible and present/absent in everyday discursive registers.

Informed by Gail Lewis’ essay ‘Questions of presence’, this two-hour studio session will be open for women of colour to drop into at any time. Each participant will encounter and be asked to respond to Lewis’ essay, re-engaging her ‘conflicted emotions, educed in the encounters between identity and otherness’ as her raced and gendered body has navigated colonial spaces (Gail Lewis, 2017). Participants will be guided to impress their bodies onto pre-rolled beds of clay or write onto the clay to create moulds from which Robinson will create plaster tablets – part of the artist’s new body of work. In taking part in PRESENCE, the artist and participants will share lived experiences, engage in the practice of pleasure and co-create work.
Artist Davinia-Ann Robinson’s practice explores the cultural politics of emotions and the ways in-which emotions effect female bodies of colour navigating through patriarchal and colonial spaces in Western culture. Robinson examines the related notions of how black women are viewed in Western culture as the ‘Other’ and ‘un-woman,’ seen through the lens of the object, the abject and the grotesque, and how they are displaced into the periphery of society. Her work draws from the lived, everyday experiences of gendered and racist systems of power, critical research into black feminist thought, race and gender studies.
 

This event is open only to women of colour.

Participants are asked to wear old clothes that they would be comfortable getting dirty and to bring a change of clothes. Participants will be able to wash off any clay.