![a sepia-toned image of a Caribbean colonial front room with the double doors open. Through the doors is view of highly polished wooden veranda with a view of a lush rainforest](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Roshini-Kempadoo1-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021-1130x606.jpg)
Featured image: “Ghosting” by Roshini Kempadoo (2004)
3 Dec 2021
First thoughts, right after the exhibition…
Feel a bit of a husk, turned inside out, introspective, considering my role in this legacy, not as Windrush descendant but as a ‘modern’ Caribbean immigrant. How do I keep the joyous resistance going? How do I carry the narrative beyond the brutal history into a new position where we have the solution, we are the solution and this time, we own the solution? We are creating the next evolutionary step – Caribbean people as harbingers/designers of the world’s future? Ambitious maybe, but highly plausible…
![front cover of booklet for exhibition featuring Sonia Boyce artwork and basic exhibition info - title, dates, museum, etc.](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/LBI-Booklet-1-at-Tate-Britain-2021.jpg)
![Blue paper with white print showing the audience flow of the exhibition through different rooms as follows - arrivals, pressure, ghosts of history, Caribbean regained, past present and future.](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/LBI-Booklet-2-at-Tate-Britain-2021.jpg)
![a sepia-toned image of a Caribbean colonial front room with the double doors open. Through the doors is view of highly polished wooden veranda with a view of a lush rainforest](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Roshini-Kempadoo1-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![a faded colour image of a Caribbean colonial bedroom with an old sepia-toned image of a young Black woman with her arms fold over her stomach as if she's hugging herself.](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Roshini-Kempadoo4-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![a scrappy wooden road side stall colour photo merged with a sepia toned photo of a black woman's face](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Roshini-Kempadoo2-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![rusty galvanize roof with an old image of a similar building from centuries ago with plantation owners and maybe foremen walking along a path](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Roshini-Kempadoo3-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![a typical 1970s West Indian front room with yello patterned wallpaper, velour upholstered sofas, lamps with fringes ont he shades, doilies at every head rest and on surfaces, a record player, plastic plants, lots of photos and music albums and Jesus Christ on the wall. All with a large box tv showing a film](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Michael-McMillan-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![2 headless mannequins dressed in fancy paisley jackets - 1 orange and gold, one gold and silver, one blue and silver. Each is wearing sharply pressed white trousers. 2 mannequins are in 2-toned shoes, all are standing behind on a red pedestal behind a tenor pan each. Several other steelpans with no 'players' also stand on red pedestals behind the three mannequins](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Grace-Wales-Bonner-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![photo of video if a person in all black robe that covers the wearer from neck to hands to feet. The masquerader's head is completely covered with an oversized head that has lots of eyes balls stuck to it](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Ada-M-Patterson-2LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![person in black sleeveless sheath with a giant headpiece that looks like a sea urchin, which covers the person's entire head and neck. Person is standing in waist-high calm blue water that laps against the rocky wall behind the costumed person](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Ada-M-Patterson-1LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![colourful abstract with muted background and white centre](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/ART-BY2.jpg)
4 April 2021
Second thoughts, a few months later…
Life Between Islands was a hard exhibition to write about. I suppose you can tell. It took me months to come back to this. I felt so triggered for most of it. Still, I knew these stories had to be told. Equally, I felt so happy to see our Caribbean resilience and joy so bold and bright! I think maybe poetry might be the way forward here. Full sentences still aren’t coming to me, so here goes…
Life Between the Islands
There needed to be a little Black boy being manipulated by white adult police officers on a tv screen
– McMillan’s Front Room
There needed to be the curio case of phallic looking bullets promising violence with their round blunted heads
– Locke’s Trophies of Empire
There needed to be multiple stop and search reports for a mother to draw how many times she nearly lost her son
– Walker’s Series 3
There needed to be the story of how a father left home and never came back, because he couldn’t
– Atille’s Dreaming Rivers
These stories needed to be told.
They needed to be heard.
They needed to stop being buried
By misinformation and deliberate misinterpretation
Buried beneath the enormous fear
Of different
Of immigrant
Of ‘ethnics’
But I tell you,
As a different ethnic immigrant
My soul took a battering.
I find the older I get, the less I can stand
This ‘trauma porn’, as Aisha calls it.
This…
Tell me how its racist
Show me evidence you were discriminated against
Prove that you were harmed
How? What would be sufficient proof?
Me running screaming naked through the streets?
Me falling down on the ground sobbing and bawling?
Well this exhibition was proof, eh
Everywhere you looked was
Dignified, creative, clever documentation of experiences
Told by the people who lived it.
It was powerful
And painful
And raw
But chile,
When I bent the corner and saw Ove’s La Jablesse and Hairy Man in rope
When I saw Ada Patterson’s urchins move through the streets of Barbados, making children laugh and run away
When I saw the sultry mischief of Lisa Brice’s Blue women
And Boyce’s Crop Over in the plantation house
And the glistening cocoyea fan from Curry
Oh yes!
Thank you, ancestors!
Thank you, sweet baby Jesus!
I exhaled.
My whole body unwound and released
Tension seeping out of every pore
With the speed and desperate relief of
That first gasp
As you break the surface
Of water that has held you for too long.
I was born in the sun
Beside the Caribbean Sea
I didn’t know this pain like this.
I know this pain with joy.
My people have mastered the art of creating joy in the midst of pain
But raw un-joyed pain?
Just so, just so?
Unrelenting
Skin-stripping
Soul-shrivelling
Heaps of pain upon pain.
No bredds.
I was born in the in-between.
Between…
….Historical trauma and modern-day crime sprees
….Middle-class oil wealth and Working-class recession
….Emotional genius and emotional distress
Is the UK that pop my in-between bubble
Lancing it with generational, systematic, institutional pain
So yes,
I inhaled that beautiful soul in the golden headpiece
The grandiose steelband men in full regalia
The fine white sand on the airline seats
All the celebrations of our resilience
All of it!
I greedily gasped it in.
After that…
I think there was more.
I vaguely remember an afro-futuristic film
Some quilted fabric… maybe?
By that point
I was too emotionally wrung out and
Mentally worn down
To focus.
So maybe there was too much
For me anyway
But tell me,
I would be curious to hear
White people, how did you experience Life between the Islands?
That experiential gap is where the learning lies.
by Leigh,
05 May 2022
![a tall dark wooden curio case of bullet or phallic shaped items on display](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Donald-Locke-Life-Between-Islands-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![Black woman in summer dress printed with black roses, arms uplifted palm-up. Sitting on her palms are a well-dressed older Black woman in a chair and a Black man in a collared shirt on an armchair with 2 little Black girls (toddlers) in fancy white dresses](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Sonia-Boyce-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![mixed media collage on wood that forms the body of a man in old colonial uniform that features a blue jacket with golden epaulettes, black sash, breeches and tall black boots. The words Toussaint L'Ouverture 1743 - 1803 are drawn above his head](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Artist-Unknown-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![the artist sketches her son on a photocopy of the police forms he receives every time he is stopped and searched. This is sketch 1, form1](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Barbara-Walker2-Life-Between-Islands-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![the artist sketches her son on a photocopy of the police forms he receives every time he is stopped and searched. This is sketch 3, form 3](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Barbara-Walker3-Life-Between-Islands-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![the artist sketches her son on a photocopy of the police forms he receives every time he is stopped and searched. This is sketch 2, form2](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Barbara-Walker1-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![woven multi-coloured multi-weighted rope collage wrapped around various pieces of driftwood and a mannequin head](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Zak-Ove2-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![woven multi-coloured multi-weighted rope collage that looks like a bearded mythical face](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Zak-Ove1-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![blue nude woman with face, breast and one knee poking through a multi-coloured plastic strip curtain. Also emerging in a darker blue cat which has caught a mouse and is carrying it in its mouth](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Lisa-Brice2-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![2 paintings with mainly red overtones. 1 painting shows a voluptuous blue nude walking away but turning back, while another woman sits at a table drinking with a hat on, and a third woman leans on a pillar with cigarette in hand. The 2nd painting shows a strip curtain with a woman dancing behind it with a beer bottle in hand. In the foreground a blue cat screeches from the top of a bar table with 2 beer bottles on it.](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Lisa-Brice1-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![a giant dried palm frond woven with magnetic cassette tape](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Blue-Curry3-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![front view of 3 red-orange airline seats with sand, shells and beads on the seats. The row of 3 seats is anchored on a bamboo frame, which supplements a missing armrest](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Blue-Curry2-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![rearview of 3 red-orange airline seats with airline trays down, each with a sunset pictured on it. The row of 3 seats is anchored on a bamboo frame](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Art-by-Blue-Curry-LBI-Tate-Britain-Dec-2021.jpg)
![a diamond shaped canvas showing colourful geometric expanding shapes](https://www.byleigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/ART-BY1.jpg)
In Summary –
Thoughts about The Space | Juxtaposition of Tate & Lyle – built with Sugar. There should have been some mention of this… some overt acknowledgement but I can see that they were covering certain years and the sugar years were more transatlantic slave trade. It definitely added something deeper to stroll through the halls built by the cane fields in my home country and the blood of my ancestors, while hearing the true unsanitised story of life with Mother England. |
Thoughts about the Collection | Powerful. Some pieces were more abstract than I could grasp, even with explanations. Some pieces needed no explanation. Some pieces drew me in but spit me out e.g. the reggae party and dancing with the man being beaten in the background. As a Black woman, some lines triggered me. e.g. I really enjoyed Sonia Boyce’s piece filmed in Barbados but there was a line in Martina Atille’s movie where Boyce was art director – “He couldn’t come home”. So many meanings – home to his culture? Himself? His family? Infidelity? Another trigger was the film playing in Michael McMillan’s Joyce’s Front Room. As a Black mother I struggled to watch more than 1 minute of white police officers trying to intimidate and manipulate a little Black boy into lying or incriminating his older brother, while he could hear sounds of said brother being beaten up in the background. |
My User Journey Experience | Organised the flow so well (see image of exhibition map at start). A true story of the brutality and rebellious joy, the bittersweetness of straddling Britain and the Caribbean. At times, I needed to leave a film or room because I was getting triggered. Too much work? I started looking around the room and picking certain pieces that caught my eye to focus on. I imagine different pieces catch different eyes so maybe it’s not ALL meant to be seen by everyone? Arted-out. Over stimulated (but then we saw BBP first) |
Take Away Feelings | Pain Hurt Pride Exhaustion Anxiety? Love Joy Resistance Especially joy in recognising and sharing the parts of our culture that are so effervescent – Carnival, music, even coconut leaves and Billy Ocean! |
Take Away Thoughts | Have less art? More engagement? Do not have things on the walls just to stare at Create an experience through the selection of art but also the atmosphere. |