Objects of identity

1 pics pasted together made theirs worded up narrated.- making sense a momento v.

2 worked on by others with request and instructions from originator – art 21

3 collated images are stuck in a box-like treasure. Imprint if small object= residue. Talisman.

Kedisha Coakley | 18 March – 30 April 2022 | Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
— Read on www.houldsworth.co.uk/exhibitions/121/press_release_text/

In Negritude No.1 (2017-2020), the wallpaper which lines the interior of The Box, Coakley takes African Caribbean coiffure as her point of departure, digitally manipulating collograph-printed synthetic hair to create patterns that recall and subvert traditional 18th and 19th century British designs. Drawing on an art form so intimately associated with the middle and upper-class white societies of the colonial era, Coakley draws attention to the ongoing influence of an aesthetics forged in the crucible of empire, an aesthetics repeatedly instrumentalised for the legitimation of imperial institutions and committed to the erasure or obfuscation of the other.