London-based transdisciplinary artist Joshua Woolford works across performance, painting, sculpture, sound, video and installation, to “confront experiences of violence, aggression and misalignment through abstract forms and sounds, verbal language and my body.” They have performed and exhibited at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and numerous venues in London, including Somerset House, Black Cultural Archives, V&A, Gucci flagship store and Camden Art Centre.
They recently completed a year-long residency at Tate Britain as Interpretation Artist in Residence 2023-24, which included live performances, a sound workshop with young people, and a reading group with PRIM, the platform for queer Black storytelling. Woolford also made six new sound pieces as dialogues with artworks in the Tate collection, to consider how sound can uncover untold or hidden stories and create new connections to art.
Your selection of artworks from Tate Britain’s collection spans 100 years, from a 1922 painting by Glyn Warren Philpot to contemporary works by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Oscar Murillo. How did you choose the works that you responded to?
Tate Britain had just been re-hung so the only rule was that the works should be public facing. My intention was to form new relationships with artworks, and I wanted all of the artists to be people of colour or queer, to push my understanding of my own identity.
I chose a range of mediums: photography with Ingrid Pollard’s work, two sculptural pieces by Mona Hatoum and Ronald Moody and the rest were paintings. I avoided video or sound works because I was bringing the sound element to otherwise ‘silent’ objects.
In artworks from pre-1900, many representations of Blackness are problematic. I wanted to feel supported and supporting rather than fighting against something, and the institution itself has a lot of colonial history embedded in it. So 1922 was as far back as I went, to Glyn Warren Philpot, who was a queer artist who often featured people of colour in his portraits.
Initially I’d intended to grapple with his sexuality and the fetishisation of his black subjects, particularly his long-time model and servant (and also possible lover) Henry Thomas. But I decided to instead focus on the contents of this specific piece [Repose on the Flight into Egypt] which allowed me to dedicate time to exploring ancient Egyptian mythology.
Did you know much about Repose on the Flight into Egypt before your residency?
No, I wasn’t familiar with it. A lot of the writing about it focuses on Greek mythology, itself taken from the symbolism of ancient Egyptian mythology. So that tension interested me – the westernising or whitewashing of a history that’s actually based in Africa.
Your response to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s painting Razorbill brought together sounds from several artists and musicians. How important is collaboration to your practice?
I find it interesting how collaboration has become a huge part of my practice in the last few years, because I’m an introvert and I really like to do things alone.
But the 2020 Black Lives Matter conversations made me hyper aware of how I exist in the minds and imaginations of other people. That my Blackness and queerness make me either more or less visible depending on the situation, the location, the expectations of the people around me. I had previously been that aware of my Blackness when I moved to the Netherlands to study, and when I was at middle school in a village where it was only me, my sister and one other person of colour in the whole school.
So that most recent hyper awareness was happening at the same time as I was at the Royal College of Art (RCA), where I was being encouraged to look outside of my personal experience. Active dialogue became essential, as well as connecting to other people’s experiences, ways of communicating and understanding.
With Razorbill, I felt a responsibility not to put words into the mouth of the female-presenting figure in the painting. So I invited women and non-binary people – artists Lie Ning, Tereza Delzz, Tawiah, Tia Simon-Campbell (Sippin’ T) – to respond with me so that it’s not just one perspective, but a multiple.
In response to Mona Hatoum’s sculpture Present Tense you worked with Radio Alhara, a Palestinian online radio station broadcasting from Bethlehem, and Handmade Palestine, which sells traditional handmade crafts. Why these collaborators?
Mona Hatoum’s piece is called Present Tense and was made in 1996. It’s made of Palestinian olive oil soap into which tiny red beads are pressed, to form an outline of the map that was drawn up during the Oslo Peace Accords [1993] between Israel and Palestine. So I was thinking, okay, what’s the present tense for now? I’d been listening to resources that Radio Alhara shared through Learning Palestine, and reached out to them to see if I could use some of the audio from these programmes.
Morgan Totah who runs Handmade Palestine, was a really special collaborator too who recorded the sounds of traditional Palestinian soap being made in the West Bank of occupied Palestine. I wanted to bring attention to the human aspect of the product and how it’s made, reinforcing the connection between the piece here in London and the lives and livelihoods of people living under occupation in Palestine. So the sound work for Tate created this knock-on effect of a chain of people being involved in its making.
Another of the works you responded to during your residency was Ingrid Pollard’s photographic and collage work The Cost of the English Landscape, which seems to relate quite directly to your video peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must. Both works consider race in relation to the English landscape, and you both situate your own bodies within rural settings. How did peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must develop?
I was commissioned by RCA Curating Contemporary Art graduating students to create a work in response to the diasporic experience and specifically the book Enigma of Arrival by V S Naipaul. I was most interested in Naipul’s approach to writing the book [a semi-autobiographical work that recounts the narrator’s experiences of moving from the Caribbean to England] while isolated in the countryside.
I found a National Trust Chartist cottage in Dodford, a building steeped in working class history and political struggle, and while staying there found out about William Cuffay, a Jamaican who was a part of the Chartist movement. It was inspiring to find someone of colour with so much political power at that time [1830s-40s] and then instantaneously saddening that there’s still such a divide between the political system we exist within and the rights of people of colour and working class people.
I was thinking of the potentials and restrictions of living in a rural setting and what it means to take up space. I improvised movements while thinking of the accounts I’d been reading, cycling between feelings of hope and disappointment. Some of my movements were inward, others reflected the Chartist slogan ‘peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must’, and that sense of a need to act: sometimes that might be violent, sometimes that might be forceful, sometimes that might be loud.
These video portraits are paired with videos of the landscape, that show beauty – flowers, baby ducks and rabbits – as well as the harshness of security cameras, barbed wire and surveillance signage. My movements reflect the physical restriction and resistance to these systems.
These images were very much informed by Ingrid Pollard’s work. And the idea that it might be natural and seem open, but a lot of barriers are still here. What does it mean to bring the Black body into the rural setting? Am I allowed to be here? What do people expect I’m doing here? What are my hopes or dreams for this space? Could I ever really fulfil this feeling of freedom in this country?
The installation of peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must has the two videos – portrait and landscape – facing one another. They both loop but are different running lengths, so are asynchronous. You’re confronted with me either dancing or crying, opposite different images at different times. I might be looking at a flag, or a rabbit and the emotion constantly shifts. I’m responding to the environment, but it’s a response that even I haven’t determined or predetermined.
You have a wide ranging practice that includes performance, painting, sculpture, sound, video and installation, alongside visual design, art direction and teaching. How do these areas of practice interact? And how do you find balance between these different commitments?
Balance – if you have any tips, please let me know! I feel like I’ve not found it but it gets easier every year or I get more used to jumping between different mindsets. Doing lots of different things brings fulfilment and introduces me to new ideas, new people constantly. But it’s exhausting and it’s mainly because I need to make money.
But I feel extremely lucky that I’m able to do things that I enjoy. And I’m really happy that I got into teaching because it’s inspiring and being in contact with younger people makes you feel like you have a relationship with the future.
Video and performance are both very transdisciplinary as practices because you have to think about timing, lighting, sound, costume, props, location. So they’re situated within many different disciplines. All of my projects are really informed by my experiences. They become infused with other people’s experiences in research and theory but the core is always something that I’ve experienced personally or something I’ve read that really stands out to me. Everything informs everything else.
What do you have coming up?
I’m currently performing in FKA Twigs’ durational piece The Eleven at Sotheby’s. It’s really nice to be a part of someone else’s work and to see how they navigate the production and how a concept is developed from an idea to practice.
On 28 September there’s the premier of Sophia Al Maria’s project zing, vecht, huil, bid, lach, werk en bewonder (Sing, fight, cry, pray, laugh, work and admire) at De Uitkijk cinema in Amsterdam. Along with eight other artists, I contributed a video chapter, which Sophia has stitched together to create an ‘exquisite corpse’ video.
In October a still from my video and you say you never met the devil? will be displayed on a flag along New Bond Street during Frieze week [9-13 October 2024] as part of Gucci’s art programme. I’ll also be performing at Somerset House as part of Making a rukus! and discussing my work at TheirStories Frieze Special: An Evening with Chadd Curry & Family.
I’m also planning a research trip to Dominica, where my family comes from. I’ve never been there, so want to connect to a heritage that I’ve never had any direct relation with, as well as meeting artists that are practicing there, people who are producing crafts and the members of the native Kalinago population.
Top image: Joshua Woolford live performance at Tate Britain, Tate Late 4 August 2023. Photo: Eugenio Falcioni
