Sonia Boyce on her latest collaborative exhibition
It was on a school trip that Sonia Boyce, aged seven, first visited the Whitechapel Gallery. She was raised nearby, and before long she was setting out by herself to get another glimpse. When I mention that she sounds like a dream child – spending her free time looking at art – she laughs gently and tells me it wasn’t like that. In her mind, going to the gallery was an ordinary thing to do, no different from visiting the corner shop. “I didn’t think of it as being highly cultured,” she says. “It was just another kind of playground.” That remains the case, though the reasons are different: her latest show opens in the same gallery this month.
We meet on a warm summer’s day and the door to her new south-London studio is propped open. We sit on lime-green chairs at a wooden table, surrounded by artworks swaddled in bubble-wrap leaning on the white walls. “I’ve been here since last November,” says Boyce, pointing out the changes she would like to make to the space, including the addition of a mezzanine. The acquisition of this studio coincided with the end of her 40-year career of art-college teaching to concentrate on making her own work. “Venice made me sit and think about the future and what is it that I want to be doing, which is investing more time in the practice,” she says, referring to the Golden Lion prize she won at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. This year, she was awarded a damehood. Though such accolades are sweet, she defines success for herself as about looking forward and maintaining a level of inquiry. “Curiosity can wane when one has established a way of working,” she says, “but it’s essential for an artist to be constantly curious not only about what they’re doing, but what others are doing, because it feeds back into the work and creates richer layers.”
Which brings us back to the Whitechapel show: An Awkward Relation. It’s coupled with another: The I and the You, the first major UK public-gallery presentation of Lygia Clark. Boyce became familiar with the Brazilian artist while working on her own first monograph with the director of the gallery, Gilane Tawadros, who spotted a certain similarity between the pair’s work. “That’s how I fell into the world of Lygia Clark,” says Boyce, pulling a copy of the monograph off a shelf and handing it to me. “My main interest in her is the way she would use objects as a means of bringing people together, and the idea that the body becomes part not only of making art, but of experiencing or encountering it.”
The exhibition will explore the similarities and differences between their work and the intentions behind it. I’m interested to hear Boyce’s thoughts on responding to someone else’s practice – how you can interact with existing ideas and create something new from them, too – and she tells me that all artists are encouraged to think about what they’re doing in relation to others. “So, I wouldn’t say I’m unique in that sense,” she says. “It has always been my desire to declare an interest in others in the work itself, and to keep myself firmly established within the field of art even as the subject matter shifts around. The way I work has its precedence, and I’m adding to and acknowledging that.”
Like Clark, who started out making abstract paintings and sculptures before developing more experimental work that turned spectators into participants in the late 1960s, Boyce’s practice has steadily become more interactive. She had a flair for drawing as a child, and as a teenager enrolled at art school, after receiving the encouragement of an observant teacher. “I thought it was a great experience, a great luxury, to have that time to simply think about and make things. But there wasn’t really a script for someone like me in that sense of thinking there was a career ahead.”
After graduating with a degree in fine art from Stourbridge College of Technology and Art in 1983, she focused for a few years on producing richly patterned, pastel-coloured drawings in which she was continually present. By the 1990s, though, those figurative bodies had given way to photography, performance and other improvised actions. She removed herself from the narrative and invited other people and perspectives to plug the gap: “I no longer wanted to be the protagonist.”
Collaboration comes naturally to Boyce, who describes herself as being part of an active DIY generation in which “you get together with others and organise your own opportunities”. As a student, she’d become involved with the emerging Black British arts movement along with the Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid, and she was busy encountering ideas about the more participatory and playful possibilities of art while teaching at Goldsmiths. She was living in shared housing in Brixton with filmmakers, photographers, and stylists – a far cry from the myth of the solo (male) artist at work all alone in his garret. “There wasn’t a dividing line between living with other people and making work with other people,” says Boyce. She has been creating social art that blurs the line between artist, audience, and object ever since. This way of working “was something that just emerged through being part of a creative community,” she reflects.
At the Whitechapel, Boyce will exhibit works that are about encountering art through touch as well as sight. She shows me several polythene bags containing braided and sewn pieces of real and synthetic hair gathered from Afro-Caribbean hair shops. Viewers will be free to handle the sculptural tresses, which were originally included in the 1993 exhibition Do You Want to Touch?, and will be shown alongside other works that untangle our assumptions and desires surrounding hair, race, and gender. Black Female Hairstyles (1995) comprises brightly coloured collages of cuts from magazines, while the 2005 video Exquisite Tension shows Boyce entwining the hair of a Black woman and a white man. It was Boyce’s hair pieces in particular that reminded Tawadros of Clark’s work.
Also on display will be a multimedia installation that documents We Move in Her Way, a group performance that originally took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2017. The piece features a cast of characters including singers and dancers. Without instructions, they move and interact spontaneously with one another, sculptural objects, and the audience, who are themselves wearing masks inspired by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a leading member of that revolutionary cultural movement Dadaism.
What would Boyce’s seven-year-old self have thought if she’d been told that, one day, the gallery down the road would be filled with her own art? Boyce laughs again. “How my life has unfolded is quite a surprise to me, as well as, I think, to other people.”
‘Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation’ is at the Whitechapel Gallery from 2 October until 12 January
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