This piece is a story for me. It's a 264x268cm cotton bedsheet, covered in kitchen roll, painted in incense ash. Then MIND THE GAP is spray painted, a poem I have written is painted joining in the opposite direction. I cut slashes into it and taped it up and sewed it up again and embellished it with gold disks with the Pakistani flag and the Queen’s face.
The bedsheet explores the relationship between the personal and the political, and private and public.
The tissue is a metaphor for my skin.
MIND THE GAP is becoming aware of cultural divide and disconnect, systemic racism and so on.
The poem is about how the gap shapes your experience how you to re-accustom yourself with things after the realisation. I wrote it the other way because of palimpsest, the process of when a writing material has been used multiple times by coving the previous text with chemicals but over time the older text comes through. The poem is addressing the relationship between coloniser and colonised.
The cutting and stitching are an internal conflict. Realising my sense of cultural identity is mine and it needs mending like a wound.
In this video the De’Anne Crooks is addressing her future child, warning them about the Britain they are being born into.
“I knew when I wrote the proposal that I really wanted to show the toxic relationship that marginalised people have with their country” (Crooks.D 2020) This is something I tried to take about in my written work.
New Arts West Midlands(2020) Q&A with De’Anne Crooks. Available at: http://newartwestmidlands.co.uk/editorial/q-a-with-deanne-crooks/ [Accessed 20/05/21]
The video is mainly shot indoors and shows the artist doing their hair, re potting plants, doing the dishes, cleaning. It’s personal and intimate but it becomes political. The relationship between private and personal and public and political is something that I’ve been considering a lot, which is why for the last piece I did I used a bedsheet. The sheet for me as a domestic item represents the private and personal. Being in bed and asking these big questions of “who am I?”, “where do I belong?”, “where am I from?” and others that stuck out in the video as it deeply resonated with me.