Maud Sulter: Passion, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

Exhibition Visit

Maud Sulter: Passion, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

Maud Sulter was an award winning artist, writer and curator of Ghanain and Scottish heritage who lived and worked in Britain.  Her work is displayed in the Scottish Parliament, the V&A, The British Council, Scottish National Gallery and The National Portrait Gallery in London.  She was also a poet and edited a collection of writings and images on black women's creativity.

This exhibition includes the main phases of here photographic career from Zabat (1989) and examples of each of the projects Hysteria, Syrcas and Les Bijoux.  Interestingly having read Alan Sekula's essay on photographic archives, the curators have had access to that of Maud Sulter.

The exhibition is in two rooms, one devoted to the theme Africa in Europe and featuring work from Syrcas, the other, in contrast features her studio work from Zabat, Hysteria and Les Bijoux.

Syrcas relates the histories of people from African descent in Europe, their persecution and murder during the Holocaust.  In this body of work she has produced some interesting but unusual collages.  This is very different to anything I have done but is fascinating.  She has taken very conventional paintings, often landscapes, and made collages with her own photographs and then photographed the resulting collage.  Having recently read Alan Sakula's essay on archives, I feel that this could be another use for archive images.  Old, archival, photographs made into collages with contemporary work.  This has actually been done by John Huddleston to document the American Civil War as mentioned in Liz Wells' book  Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity. Wells refers to this use of archive photographs when discussing the work of Huddleston in Killing Ground (2002) when he used his own contemporary colour photographs made at American civil war battle sites and juxtaposed them with archive materials.  Wells says that the archive images include studio portraits of those newly enlisted for family and friends and they testify to fear of not returning.  She goes on to argue that this montage tactic is effective poetically as well as for historical detail. (Wells,L. 2011 Kindle location 1527)

The second room in the exhibition features work from Zabat, Hysteria and Les Bijoux.  Zabat is Sulter's most well known work, winning the British Telecom New Contemporaries prize in 1990. Originally nine images of black women portrayed as the nine muses.  Three images are displayed and they are very large, rich colour portraits of black women.  I particularly liked Terpsichore. It is of a black woman, a performance artist called Della Street who created the costume as part of a dance installation piece called The Quizzing Glass.  She is dressed in a startling white, Georgian period dress with a white wig and deals with the relationships in a slave/mistress situation.  Calliope is a self portrait where Sulter represents Jeanne Duval, the mistress of Charles Baudelaire dressed as Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.

Les Bijoux is the culmination of Maud Sulter's fascination with Jeanne Duval and in this series of photographs she portrays herself as Duval and tries to answer the question "Who was Jeanne Duval?".

Hysteria tells the tale of a nineteenth Blackwoman artist who came to Europe from the Americas, achieved success as a sculptor and then disappeared.  The original installation comprised 8 photographs of Hysteria, Edmonia Lewis and her circle.  These images are once again large, rich prints.

References

Street Level Photoworks  (2015) Maud Sulter - Passion  [online]  Available from: http://www.streetlevelphotoworks.org/event/maud_sulter_passion  [Accessed 9.6.15]

V&A Search the Collections (2015) Calliope, Zabat [online] Available from: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O134377/calliope-zabat-photograph-sulter-maud/ [Accessed 9.6.15]

V&A Images of Posters and Photographs to Print, (2015) Maud Sulter, Terpsichore [online] Available from: http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/3276 [Accessed 9.6.15]

Wells, L. (2011) Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity Kindle London/New York: I.B.Tauris