Simone Leigh describes her practice as a form of “auto-ethnography,” an anthropological
Simone Leigh describes her practice as a form of “auto-ethnography,” an anthropological excavation of her own life and family histories that opens up onto different worlds, cultures, and temporal dimensions. These investigations take form in open-ended, ongoing explorations of material and form, with a particular emphasis on ceramics. Leigh’s sculptures manifest black female subjectivity on multiple registers, from specific cultural references, to general invocations of the female form, to the very processes of their making, often drawing on typical “women’s work” from throughout the Global South. The temporal element of her practice—repetition, endurance, extended meditation, intensive manual labor—allows her to almost literally embody this anonymous labor and summon its practitioners to the present. Materials and the objects they form (cowrie shells, busts, jugs) suggest the networks of capitalist exploitation that trafficked interchangeably in bodies and products. As Malik Gaines has described, “These nodes of commodity exchange, symbolic language, and phenomenological embodiment constitute a triangle-trade of diasporic life.”Simone Leigh, Herero Dress, 1904, 2011 -- source link
#simone leigh