Davinia-Ann Robinson photographed by Rhiannon Hunter
Photo courtesy of the artist
Damaris Athene: Could you start by telling me a bit about yourself?
Davinia-Ann Robinson: My name is Davinia-Ann Robinson, I am 34 years old and my pronouns are she/her. I was born and grew up in Wolverhampton. I moved to London, when I was 18, to do my BA and I recently graduated from the Slade for my MFA, where I was in the sculpture department.
DA: Could you say a bit more about your practice?
DR: I'm interested in how Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies can enact presencing through corporeally and tactically engaging with environments which we dwell in, and if these engagements can act as a means of dismantling colonial and imperial frameworks which our bodies and nature is understood. My work does this through sculpture, writing, and I’m also starting to look at performance as well.
DA: What kind of form does that performance take?
DR: My works are quite performative anyway, it's just a lot of it isn’t seen. Making the sculptures involves impressions of my body on to beds of clay or making casts to make wax sculptures. More recently, the clay and the impressions of my body has become the work. I've realised that the processes of handling the clay, rolling the clay, cleaning the clay, and even gathering it are performance. I visit certain sites where I've experienced colonial violence and I gather the soil or the clay from that space. Alongside that I’ve started to develop sound with my work.
DA: What form does the sound take?
DR: The sound initially came from poems which I wrote which explore colonial violence I've experienced, the spaces that these took place and the emotions that were felt. It developed from me reading the poems, to my voice emoting those emotions I felt through sounds, which don't necessarily make linguistic sense, but are making sense through a feeling that they evoke. I incorporate the sound with the sculptural pieces.
whose flesh you are, 2021, Gathered Clay, Filtered Clay, Body Impressions, Soundscapes
Dimensions variable
Photo courtesy of the artist
DA: I remember in your degree show piece that the sound felt very bodily and guttural. It's really interesting to hear the link with your poetry and your emotional responses to colonial violence you’ve experienced.
DR: With the sound work at my degree show, there were three tracks. Two were developed from soundscapes, which I previously made. I cut up sounds and made them into a synth. It was the first performance that I'd ever done, at Quench Gallery, Margate earlier this year, which was this solitary performance where I hooked up a touch sensitive synth to the clay, and then I conjured these emotions felt during these experiences and pressed my body into the clay, and the clay played these sounds back. The soundscapes are becoming more embodied as the work develops.
DA: Do you find the processes of going to the sites where you've experienced colonial violence therapeutic? Being able to take the clay and make it into something that's your own.
DR: Yeah, it is really therapeutic. It's also very uncomfortable. You're going back into an environment where someone may question you, may deem to have more right over that environment or that space than I do. You're opening yourself up to being questioned, to being stopped, but exploring my connection to these environments, through tactilely engaging with the earth are an important process, in dismantling’s colonial structures which dictate which bodies are allowed to dwell in and engage with certain spaces.
DA: Have you ever felt like you wish you hadn't gone back?
DR: No, I haven’t, which is great. I also write about these experiences while I am revisiting the environments. In doing so it provides different layers of exploring my time and I can revisit that writing at a later date which sometimes offers an unrealised perspective. It also gives an opportunity for me to expand on that moment and to think about other bodies that have been in the space as well.
EARTH, BODY. 2020, Soil, Wax, Gold Earrings, Stones, Braids, Fern
2m x 4m
Photo courtesy of the artist
DA: How do you normally present your writing, if you're not reading it to make sound work?
DR: A few weeks ago I released a publication for the first time entitled ‘Corporeal Intimacies: Through Tactile Knowledge’s of the Anthropocene’ which coincided with a group exhibition at Kupfer, a gallery in London. The exhibition was called ‘Being Here’ curated by Jeanette Gunnarsson. There is also some of that writing on my website, but normally, it just stays with me and will come out in the sound work or in the installations.
DA: Congratulations! What motivates you to work with sculpture and installations?
DR: It feels really natural to engage with materials. It's not about knowing what I'm going to make, but it’s about exploring that material and discovering more about what I’m thinking about through creating.
DA: Sculpture makes sense with the connection between your body and the work, them feeding back between one another and having this very direct relationship between the material and your body. How have you explored colonial and imperial frameworks within your work? You've touched on this, but is there anything you'd like to add?
DR: I explore through my own experiences, that's how the work comes along and then it spreads out. Colonial Imperial frameworks are all around us and press into us daily. It's experienced constantly. I explore these frameworks. A couple of weeks ago, I had an interview for some funding, during the interview I was asked by a member of the panel who was a white elderly man of a high economic status ‘could you explain what kind of colonial violence you have experienced?’
DA: Ouch! All of the trauma!
DR: Tell me and prove your trauma, is basically what they said. I gave an example, I wish I had not, it was inappropriate for me to have been asked this question, but in the moment I gave an example of when I was working on a bar in Australia at a party and someone gave the birthday person a golliwog as a birthday present.
DA: Oh, my God!
BOD(Y)IES THAT WEATHER, 2020, Soil, Water, Wax, Pigment Made From Earth, Propagated Plants
1.5m x 0.5m
Photo courtesy of the artist
DR: Imperial and colonial violence seep into our everyday constantly. This is a violent act. It has derived from extraction of Black, Brown and Indigenous bodies and extraction of the natural world. These acts led to this golliwog being created and given as a gift. I was told by the member of the panel who asked the question, that my experience was ‘not colonial violence’. Being asked to prove my lived experiences to anyone, let alone someone who experiences great social, economic, political, and racial privilege and who is in charge of a large sum of money, I need, whilst having my lived experiences of colonialism denied, is colonial violence.
DA: Thank you for sharing that. What horrible experiences. What significance does soil have in your practice?
DR: I think maybe two and a half years ago I started revisiting the sites where I've experienced colonial violence. It was as a means of repair, connecting myself to the space, re-articulating myself and that space, and exploring how my body is in that space and how I am in that space. The soil or clay locates a space, but also has a colonial history that my body also has, extraction practices of bodies and of natural resources through the Atlantic Slave trade. There’s this shared violence which has taken place. It marks displacement and movement, but also at the same time, it marks a connection to an environment. We've come to understand our relationships to land and ourselves as being separate through this colonial framework of extraction.
DA: It must be really labour intensive process processing this clay, which must have so many impurities within it. Could you speak about that process?
DR: For my degree show work ’whose flesh you are' the clay was from London. I filtered more than half of the 700 kilograms I collected. It was a process of washing, soaking, sieving, and then hanging the clay from the ceiling of my studio in pillowcases to let the water drip out before putting it on plaster beds to soak the rest of the water out. Then I had to wedge the clay. It was a really labour intensive, exhausting process, but very performative as well. I think you can see that the clay has been dug from the ground. There's this history to it.
Clay preparation for ‘whose flesh you are’
Photo courtesy of the artist
DA: Do you recycle the wet clay from your installations at the end of each show?
DR: Yeah, so I soak it again to rehydrate it, clean it, wedge it, and wrap it up for the next time. Every time I use it, it looses little bits. I’m imagining the moment when its half gone!
DA: When you display the work, how much of that process do you share in the information you put alongside it?
DR: I'll say things like gathered clay to imply that is not shop bought. It’s something that I want to develop further. There's all this other process to the work, which I've come to realise is actually the work. I want to start incorporating the performance element to my work alongside my sculpture and installation works.
DA: I look forward to seeing how it develops! How have you found your practice has developed over your time at Slade?
DR: I think it's become more open in terms of medium, incorporating writing and sound. The work still stems from my personal experiences, but it has become wider reaching in what I'm exploring. It's developed in ways that I didn't foresee it developing, which is great.
DA: How do you usually work? Has it been affected by the pandemic?
DR: I think, for a long time, without really knowing that I'm in deep thought. I have inklings about the sorts of things that I want to try or directions that I want to go, but I don't realise that I've had those inklings until I'm doing the work months later and I look back. I might not be in the studio more than a couple of times a week, for two months or something, and then I'll have six weeks where it's intense and I'm there from 9 in the morning till 11 at night. I’ll be doing a lot of physical making at that moment.
EARTH, BODY. 2020, Soil, Wax, Gold Earrings, Stones, Braids, Fern
2m x 4m
Photo courtesy of the artist
DA: I saw your work for the first time at Quench Gallery. Could say a bit more about that installation? It had hair, weave, and then water as well.
DR: There was a large piece of work in the space called ‘EARTH, BODY.’ Creating that work was the first time I'd ever gone to a site and gathered from that space. I went back to Wolverhampton to my old school grounds and I gathered the stones which feature in the work from the path which I walked every day. It was also the first time I ever used soil or compost. The sculpture consists of a pair of hands made of compost and wax with a fern growing out of it. With that work I was exploring ‘whose bodies are allowed to encroach on whose bodies?’ I was thinking a lot about the movement of violence, and what does violence look like? What does it sound like? I started writing as well. Initially that work had a soundscape with it, which I later took out to develop it further. 'BOD(Y)IES THAT WEATHER’ another work in Quench, was a puddle which I'd made with compost that had casts of my thumb's made with pigment from earth I had gathered floating in it. The thumbs also had plants growing through them, which I had cultivated in my home. I was thinking about how my body exists and weathers in different spaces that I dwell in, and the shared history of displacement and movement, that Bodies of Colour and plants have experienced. I have a lot of plants in my house and I was thinking about this moment of care and what it meant for my displaced body to care for these displaced plants. The third work was the remains of a performance called ‘Flesh to Flesh’. It was the first time I'd ever done a performance, I called it a solitary performance. I connected the synth with my soundscape and pressed my body into the gathered clay to relay certain sounds. The title of the show, 'I'm unsure as to if it is still alive', was taken from a poem which I'd written while revisiting a particular / the same environment over the period of four months. It was a duo show with Natalia Gonzalez Martin.
DA: What would you like people to get from your work?
DR: That's a good question. I've been thinking about it a lot. If you don't understand what the work is trying to say, then it's not for you. The work is not there to inform and educate about colonial and imperial frameworks. The labour of that is not for my practice, at all. If the work resonates with someone then that’s who the work is for.
whose flesh you are, 2021, Gathered Clay, Filtered Clay, Body Impressions, Soundscapes
Dimensions variable
Photo courtesy of the artist
DA: Whose work inspires you?
DR: I really love the work of Vivian Caccuri, Tabita Rezaire, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Grada Kilomba, Veronica Ryan and Ana Mendieta's work as well.
DA: Ana Mendieta is the only one out that list that I know, I’ll have to do some research. I can definitely see the connection with her work and yours. The imprint of the body on the land and the performative nature of it as well.
DR: Completely. There’s no boundary. It's super simple, but not, you know, which I really love.
DA: What projects have you been working on recently?
DR: I had my degree show and then I had a group show at Kupfer and had a group show with Hot Desque in Newcastle called 'Terrestrial Act', this summer. The show with Hot Desque was a one-day exhibition, a film is being made exploring the works, which is going to be shown at NewBridge Project. My work ‘Earth, Body.’ is on show at Firstsite Gallery, in Colchester on the 24th of September, part of New Contemporaries and it’s being shown in the Art Encounters Biennale in Romania at the end of the month. I am also starting my PhD at Goldsmiths next week.
DA: Oh, nice that you're carrying on studying. I look forward to seeing how your work develops. Thank you so much Davinia-Ann!
DR: Thank you!
