Foreign Exchange – Creating My Own Artist’s Currency

Foreign Exchange – an artist’s currency

I’ve been working on (ok, thinking about) my currency project, Foreign Exchange, for a few years now.

Foreign Exchange refers to my experience of living between currencies. As a Barbadian, my country’s currency was tied to the US dollar at a rate of 2:1 – so there was always a sense of being half as valuable, or having to work twice as hard for the same result.

After moving to the UK, I experienced an even greater shift in value, with one Barbados dollar roughly equating to one third of one British pound at one point.

Creating my own currency is an act of resetting value.

I’ve naturally settled on an exchange rate of 2:1, resetting my own personal valuation along the lines of the system I grew up under.

Money is a faith-based construct. Every physical piece of money is a token offered in exchange for something of actual value. You have to have faith in the value of the token offered in exchange for money to exist and be worth something, and you have to have faith in the value of a society to appraise its currency at twice that of another’s.

Every Barbados dollar was worth only half of one American dollar, and that bothered me when I thought about the labour it took to earn that single Bajan dollar. It wasn’t worth less than the equivalent, but the money was.

How the art currency project works:

Artwork created for the project takes the form of cheques, coins and notes.

Notes are created with specific denominations (in limited editions).

Cheques are an even more personal form of exchange, as they must be written out to one individual, and that individual is free to request the amount they want the cheque to be made out for. (The minimum amount that a cheque can be written for is £25.)

You can take your chances in paying them in to your bank… whether they will be honoured is a risk you would have to take, but then that would mean that the artwork and its value as an artwork above its base matter would be lost.

Haworth Annual Open 2017

The Haworth Annual Open 2017

The preview for the Haworth Annual Open Exhibition was on Friday, September 29th. I couldn’t make it, but I did go the next day to see the exhibition and visit my selected pieces, Fight and At Rest.

 

This is the first year that I’ve entered the Haworth Annual Open, and I was very happy to see that the exhibition was clearly very well chosen – no, I know what you’re thinking: I would say that, as I was included, right? Well, what I mean to say is that whilst smaller venues get the ‘provincial’ label, the quality of the work on display was clearly well beyond village tea room standard, and this exhibition should be on a stealthy collector’s list for picking up a hidden gem or two.

 

 

Two of my pieces at the Haworth Gallery in Accrington.

 

 

Whilst veering strongly towards representational realism, as you would expect, the variety of working methods employed by the selected artists is refreshing.

 

I thought that my painting did benefit from a good position, directly in the line of sight from a doorway; it did however have the disadvantage of being quite low and wrestling with the large, commanding work right above it. But the trio of artworks complement each other well, being loosely of the same subject matter.

 

"Fight" by Lee Devonish at the Haworth Open Annual in Accrington.

 

At Rest has an odd position, but I like it – perched on an edge, adding to its uneasy (I think) quality.

These were hung in Room 4, which was entitled “People and Portraiture”.

 

Across the hall, Room 3 held “Abstract and Animals”, and upstairs the corridor and Exhibition Room held “Woodlands, Waterfalls, Still Life and Steam Trains”.

The hanging was carried out by the members of the Haworth Artist Network, who did a very good job.

 

My sculpture at the Haworth Open 2017, Accrington

The Haworth Annual Open 2017 in Accrington opened on the 29th of September and runs until the 26th of November. The gallery is open between Tuesday – Friday 12 – 4:45 pm, and Saturday – Sunday 12 – 4:15 pm.

Other People’s Hair

“I like other people’s hair better than mine.”

Isn’t it always the way?

What’s the weird compulsion to straighten our hair when it’s curly, or curl it when it’s straight?

A lot of the time we’re fighting against our genetic nature: striving to differentiate ourselves from our immediate peers. We put on a style to describe who we are and what we are, or at least what we want to be.

Life gets much easier when we just accept what grows out of our heads (or what doesn’t), and make the most of that.

By the way, I don’t really like other people’s hair better than mine.

Maybe I used to once… but I’ve grown out of it, and my hair’s grown out too.

 

How does your hair shape your identity and community? Read “Roots And Culture” for more.

Smoking Man

Smoking Man: Lime Wood Carving, 2015.

There’s something a bit haunting and lonely about this piece.

I purposefully meant for him to stand apart from everything I had been doing, as if he was the embodiment of the outsider. Unlike most of my figures, this is an allegorical figure, not an exact portrait of a individual subject.

I wanted to follow the face and see where it would lead me, but at the same time resist the urge to polish that I usually indulge in my sculpture. The result was someone I did not know appearing out of the wood; as I carved, I decided who I wanted him to be.

I saw a worn down company man, mostly there but not entirely, waiting to be filled with whatever you expect to see inside and taking up less space than he wants to.

It was a bit like telling myself a short story.

Smoking Man. Lime wood carving with paper and graphite by Lee Devonish, 2015
Smoking Man. Lime wood carving with paper and graphite, 2015

Materials with their own truths

The thin slivers of coloured paper wedged between the raw wood blocks point to the shared origins of both materials and their differing end points, as well the level of refinement each material has received and its perceived importance in the structure.

I enjoy relating this lamination of materials to the seams of difference that run through us, whether in the form of feelings, ambitions or a sense of identity.

Smoking Man. Lime wood carving with paper and graphite by Lee Devonish, 2015.
Lime wood carving with paper and graphite, 2015

Planes, imperfections and crossed directions

We are all composites of parts that come from the same source but don’t quite fit, and our grain might not run in exactly the same directions within us. Cut us apart and we are cobbled together with pieces that are hopefully assembled, with the spaces between being sometimes as precious as the solid parts that surround and consume space.

Or perhaps we started whole, and lost something along the way?

This piece is available to buy direct or from Etsy.

Roots And Culture

Roots And Culture – how hairdressing constructs identity and race.

Hair, as a somatic marker of race, has historically been used as a tool in order to construct racialized subjects for oppressive means. The politics of afro hair styling – to straighten or remain ‘natural’ – can often appear to be simple, yet there is no clear consensus over how the personal statement becomes politicised, or whether it should.

This essay examines the concept of a post-racial future set out by thinkers such as Emmanuel Eze and Paul Gilroy, and considers the effects of the segregation of service provision for afro hair.

It considers matters of choice in identity and asks whether such a thing as a black community exists, and furthermore, to what extent does hair actively contribute to the concept of black community?

Context

This essay was written in 2013, before Rachel Dolezal became a household name; re-reading my words now, I can’t help but think about her as an example to illustrate the complexity of the construction of identity as well as community and belonging.

At the time, I lived in Peckham; it was a place where I could finally walk into any salon and get my hair done. I hadn’t been able to do that for thirteen years! I had a strange sensation of belonging on one hand, mixed with knowing that I was a newcomer to London and was actually a bit of a cultural mishmash; I didn’t really understand all of the cultures that surrounded me, but it didn’t matter. I still felt as if I could belong.

 

An excerpt.

“Where do you get your hair done?”

Mary had just arrived that month, transplanted from Kenya to Kent because of her new husband’s job at a local hotel. The question didn’t surprise me; I knew it would come eventually. It had to.

There weren’t many people she could have asked, seeing as the question was actually, “where can I get my hair done?”.

In our village there was me, and Donna. Kind of like a black girls’ support network. Only Donna always went up to a woman’s house somewhere in London and came back with a head full of new plaits and visible gridded scalp, and it was like a glorious mystery to me. She sometimes told me before she went, and I would order a box of relaxer so that I could straighten my hair at home, back in the days when I was chemically dependent.

Now, Mary had enough to deal with, learning the language of life in rural England, without having to make her way up to the sprawling metropolis in search of a hairdresser on her own. From where we stood, the A2 and A20 stretched down to us like dark, hairy arachnid arms, reaching out to us, pulling us in.

I knew that the closer we drew to the spider-city’s southern belly, the more they became cluttered with shopfronts offering fried chicken, money transfers, minicabs and, of course, hair. Hair in all forms. Hair to buy. Hair products. Hairdressing. But not just any hair – our hair.

Chapters

  1. Where Do You Get Your Hair Done?
  2. Race
  3. Raciology and Culture
  4. Hair
  5. Roots and Rhizomes
  6. Loose Ends
  7. Bibliography

 

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Selected bibliography

 

Bell, R. H. 2002. Understanding African Philosophy: A Cross-Cultural Approach To Classical and Contemporary Issues. Routledge. UK

Biddle-Perry, G. & Cheang, S. (eds) 2008. Hair: Styling, Culture And Fashion. 2008. Berg. UK

Danquah, M. N. in: Tate, G. (ed.) 2003. Everything But The Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture. Broadway Books. USA

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. USA

Fuss, D. 1989. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference. Routledge. UK

Gilroy, P. 2000. Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. UK

Gilroy, P. 2002 There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack. Routledge Classic. UK

Mercer, K. 1994. Welcome To The Jungle: New Positions In Black Cultural Studies. Routledge. UK

O’Neal, G. in: Johnson, K. & Lennon, S. (eds) 1999. Appearance And Power. Berg. UK

Stilson, J. 2009. Good Hair. Chris Rock Entertainment/HBO Films. USA

 

Roots And Culture by Lee Devonish - an essay about how hairstyling constructs racial identity and community.