Maria Amidu and Gemma Lloyd in Conversation

January 2023

Printed on the occasion of living in fear of quicksand by Maria Amidu at the Nunnery Gallery and Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives (3 March to 21 May 2023). The exhibition was conceived in collaboration with Independent Curator & Studio Manager Gemma Lloyd. 

Quicksand

Gemma Lloyd Maybe we could start by talking about the title of the exhibition – living in fear of quicksand. We've discussed this as a phenomenon shared by a particular generation, who were exposed to numerous films that incorporated it as a plot device. Can you say something about your use of this phrase?

Maria Amidu It came out of a conversation I was having with someone a while back when we were watching an old film, there was a classic scene of somebody slowly sinking, and I said, ‘oh my god, we lived in fear of quicksand, we spent our childhoods living in fear of quicksand’ and I thought that's a good title for something and it stayed with me. It’s related to strong memories of being in Bexhill-on-Sea, especially because we used to watch lots of films on Saturday afternoons, and because the beach was a dominant feature during my childhood. The images of characters in the films, fatigued, distressed and in their slow demise, had strong resonances with my life suddenly changing and me not understanding what was happening. The title is alluding to a certain kind of intense anxiety and articulates a particular moment in cultural history at the same time.

GL In the Radiolab podcast I shared with you, they were discussing how today's generation has no relationship to the quicksand phenomenon and its fear factor. The children they interviewed found zombies or mythical creatures a more terrifying prospect. Quicksand is seen as redundant – it’s a defunct plot device that isn’t woven into child’s play anymore, and its presence in films has completely disappeared.

MA Yes, and they also talked about how it was used as a socio-political motif. It's interesting. And for me, it was also literal – we were living on the coast and played on the beach a lot and when the tide went out we would shout: ‘quicksand, quicksand’. The phrase for me conjures up an ever-present sense of danger, an uncertainty, not being sure-footed in the landscape, a perilous situation, being frightened.

GL Nothing was stable…

MA No. I listened to a narration of The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis recently, I didn't know anything about the story apart from the chess theme. It's actually about a young woman who grew up in care and the opening chapters are to me some of the best descriptions I've come across of what it feels like. It illustrates the profound lack of emotional care for the child and the expectation from the adults that you must immediately adapt but what happens is that you very, very quickly learn to assume nothing.

Companionship

GL In the exhibition handout you've included a film playlist, and on the gallery wall you’ve included a quote by Gabriel García Márquez. The works in the exhibition incorporate extracts from writing by Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Elif Shafak and Toni Morrison, and you reference pop lyrics by the singers Mack and Katie Kissoon and David Cassidy. I read this as a real generosity in your work. You’re always making space for others and their voices, their ideas. Do you cite these as inspiration for the work, or does the presence of their words and their ideas function more as an extension of the ideas you're grappling with?

MA I think that's such a nice question. And I hadn't really thought about it as being generous. So, for me, it’s both. I don't think I can separate those two approaches. I can't remember how I came across the Angelou quote because I was writing air for such a long time I can't quite pinpoint exactly when it came along. But when I found it, it completely articulated something I was grappling with. The process of trying to come to terms with emotional experiences I hadn’t examined, realising I was trying to give form to certain kinds of silences. It enabled me to write in a more intentional way perhaps, it gave me permission to write on my own terms, to break away from the formal conventions of writing a book.

GL When you're writing something in a conventional way with an agent etc., there are so many other people you must be aware of who are thinking in business terms as well as creative terms – how can we sell this book? And that feels like the wrong vehicle for your practice. What you just said about permission, it’s beautiful to set this up for yourself. This has been a big theme for the show as well. Everyone involved in the realisation of the show has worked according to boundaries and terms around what is communicated and what is not.

MA Realising I could break away from conventions was the point when my creative practice flowed a lot better. The quotes illustrate my intention; they helped me uncover my own reality – experiences I’d suppressed because of the attitudes of others, people who could not tolerate the truth of things I needed to say. All the references affirm this in some way.

GL There’s a companionship with them in a way.

MA Yes, they are allies who are offering clues to the reader or viewer, and to me in fact. As if somebody is holding your hand and saying this is important. And thinking about the popular music, for me, they are rememberings I’ve transformed into something more.

GL Material you are reshaping.

MA Yes, and I see them differently to the quotes. The music pulls me back to particular moments in the past and invokes sensations from those moments in time. And then the playlist of films – in the process of making the work, I’d come across things and think, I’ll just make a note of that. As my notes accumulated, I started having this idea about a playlist because the films were speaking my language; they understood what I was trying to get at. These other voices are so evidently wrestling with things I am very interested in artistically and personally. I thought they might be a useful way to ‘speak on my behalf’ once I’d decided not to do any public events during the show.

GL You can get immersed in films; they provoke your senses.

MA Definitely, and they trigger mirror neurons. Film is immediate in that way because you see yourself reflected. They've always provoked emotions in me that often come out in the form of tears. During one of the films on my playlist, Nowhere Special, I basically cried through the whole screening. Luckily, there were only three other people in the cinema. I came out into the foyer with this handful of soggy tissues. People have sometimes derided my reactions as sentimental, which always makes me wonder what’s so wrong with sentimentality... In all the films I've selected there is somebody, usually a child, in a vulnerable situation, and the other protagonists are either helping them or hindering them. People are messing up or trying their best not to mess up. And these are aspects that surround my artworks.

GL Seeing yourself, real or imagined.

MA Yes, and thinking about seeing yourself – my intention for the show is that people leave thinking less about my experiences and more about their own.

GL It asks for an examination of our words and actions.

MA Absolutely, because it's relational, isn't it, we are continually in relation with others; our actions have an impact, have consequences.

Writing

GL You are a prolific note-taker and recorder of ideas, and the walls in your studio are often covered in a collection of handwritten thoughts that might still need to be fully resolved or linked to the work you are making but are waiting for their moment to function. It feels like this exhibition has become a receptacle for so much of what you’ve noted down over the years.

MA I am a definitely a collector of information, a friend called me an archivist. After I reorganised my studio last year, I was explaining my organising principles to one of my PhD supervisors, and he asked me this really interesting question, which was: how do you think the way you index feeds into your research question because there seems to be something significant about the way you organise and collect? I organised my books under the headings I used in my first literature review – correspondence, materiality, emotion, anatomy and care. Somebody else might have arranged them alphabetically, but I needed to see them in relation to the thoughts that come to mind. I've tried to order everything in a way that corresponds with my thinking, making and writing processes.

GL This is an exhibition that incorporates film, print, and sound installation but writing and language play an enormous and fundamental role in all of the works and their titles. And there's this incredibly visceral quality to air – the piece that is the genesis of the exhibition. I recall when you first sent it to me – going back to what you were saying about writing on your own terms – it immediately dawned on me a few pages in that I needed to put the usual reading rules aside. There is a silent intonation in the text. And there's this precision. You made decisions about when to use capitals, when to use punctuation, and when not to use it, and you have built each sentence in a very deliberate, considered way. Could you expand on that a little bit? What role does writing play in your practice as a whole and this project in particular?

MA My attention to writing is something that has magnified since I started doing my research.

GL When did you start your PhD?

MA I started in September 2020. My research question moved from a very concrete, material science idea about the potential of a material holding the emotion of the maker so someone else could sense that emotion into what my supervisor recently called, a much more poetic space. The shift happened through work I was making when we were all instructed to stay at home. I sent some images and texts to friends, colleagues and my supervisors for feedback, and when they got back to me they all said, independently, you know the work you’re making is really interesting, but what is also very particularly interesting is your command of language and the way you use writing as a form of expression. This led to me finally understanding that writing is my artistic practice. It was such a penny dropping moment for me, even though I have used writing a lot in my work! So, I started asking myself what is writing doing for me, why is writing my thing? Going back to doing things on my own terms, when I'm writing I don't intentionally sit down to write creatively. What's usually happening is that I’m replaying an emotional dilemma – a memory or a feeling that I've had or a conversation with a friend, and it’s often an occasion where I have been misunderstood or ignored, and then a sentence comes to mind. What’s forming is about me trying to make myself understood or me trying to understand myself. I'm often in the middle of doing something else, and for some reason, water often seems to feature, I can be washing the dishes, or running a bath. It often happens when I’m walking too. I stop, find a piece of paper, scribble the sentence down or tap words into the notes function on my phone and then I’m compelled to focus on what I’ve jotted down and that’s when I pause and commit to writing. I’m thinking, okay so what is this? What’s trying to make itself known here?

GL Would you ever describe it as cathartic, not that you're doing it for that purpose, but I recall you going back and forth with a word in the editing process of air because the word you had was just not quite describing it. You are making all the words work really hard. And I feel like there's a satisfaction about that close attention.

MA Yes, there is a cathartic element, it definitely has a part in it. I'm mainly looking at what the writing is doing. There’s also a strong focus on materiality because handwriting on paper and typing words on the screen are for me different kinds of writing process, my thought processes are different. I’m yet to articulate this coherently but it is emerging as my research develops. Writing as a form of consolation is also important to me. There's a book by Michael Ignatieff called On Consolation, Finding Solace in Dark Times and he discusses being in conversation with yourself. So, for me there is both a creative and emotional catharsis. Catharsis is on a spectrum for me let’s say, it’s not just about release. I also wanted to say something about the pace of air, and how I’m using punctuation and how I’ve avoided repeating descriptive words unless they represent a particular motif that necessarily runs through the narrative. I’ve also avoided the metaphorical because what is on the page is what I actually do mean so there's no ambiguity. I wanted to create an embodied reading experience. If I’m searching for a word to match a particular feeling I might run my hands across the surface of my work bench or I'll go in search of something, an object, a photograph and study that to find the exact word I need to use. It's about getting the interiority out into the exterior for me, and writing, like the voice, is the conduit for this. When I'm writing I'm inside myself and outside of myself simultaneously.

GL There’s an interesting contrast between air and things I want known and also do not want to share. One text was created by typing on the computer, carefully and intentionally, whereas the other was made by spontaneously hitting typewriter keys, sometimes with force, and those words are unedited and unfiltered.

MA Yes, it’s great you point out the distinction. things I want know and also do not want to share grew out of notes to self for conversations in therapy. I realised their content was important and thought I need to do something with these scraps, that’s how the piece started. As the idea developed I’d go to the typewriter to expel frustration or grief or sadness or indignation, but I knew I never wanted anyone to read what I’d said whilst wishing I could express these things out loud into the world but also wondering who I was protecting by keeping them concealed. In the end, I was not prepared to risk making myself that vulnerable. The work itself is physically very vulnerable, very fragile. There's something interesting about writing and reading and the fact they are also very mundane human endeavours, aren't they – we make shopping lists, we read bus timetables, we scribble quick notes so we don’t forget things. We take reading and writing for granted. We also turn these mundane behaviours into something more resonant sometimes.

GL You’re allowing a transformation to take place.

MA Yes, I'm really fascinated by language and self-expression. The throat is the locus of uttered and unuttered correspondence. We all have an inner voice, and sometimes it isn’t released, and doesn’t get heard. That is what I'm trying to do with the show – to attend to what gets stifled, or whispered, or muttered, or mumbled. Either way, it's what makes us who we are, and to articulate ourselves we are often compelled to put pen to paper, or at least I am.

GL Funnily enough, when we first met, the project we were working on – Dolphin Loves Disco (and other favourite words) – the end result was all about text and language and handwriting.

MA Yes, that’s right! It’s no surprise really that I've ended up looking closely at writing because books raised me. I read all the time as a kid and wrote stories; it was one of the things you could always find me doing. I know so many people have said this before but books opened up the world to me, they basically became my parents. And books raise me still.

Fragments

GL air is comprised of three distinct parts, and is accompanied by a faithful reproduction of a number of pieces of archival material that are located in their permanent home at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives. The other works include excerpts from air or relate directly and indirectly to it. Visitors to the exhibition experience the show across two sites, you can't see everything in one space; there is a fragmentary nature to living in fear of quicksand. Can you say more about your intentions for the gallery visitor? We've talked previously about the words fragmentary and discombobulating and how they are important to you. I see this preoccupation mirror itself in how the exhibition is constructed and in the artworks themselves.

MA air has been 25 years in the making, and the show has been a slow evolution. I didn't have any kind of master plan, it’s been more of an iterative process, which is also not surprising because that’s how my practice always develops. The process we've gone through whilst developing the show has been in itself fragmentary because we have been working on it since 2019, and often we were waiting – for responses, considering possibilities, sleeping on things. I hadn't thought about the two separate sites from the viewers’ perspective so precisely, but now you've asked me this question I’m thinking ‘interesting’… As we got closer to the install, I started thinking about the balance between the two spaces because I see it all as one show which happens to be across two locations, so I applied a basic logic – the artworks go into the art gallery and the archive material goes into the archive but there is an identity to the show, which I’d say is unsettledness, and the distance between the two sites does add to this idea of shifting sands. And air is structured in the way it is because fragmentation and discombobulation have been central to the writing experience and because it was written in phases. Some of the, let’s call them, fallow periods were very long. It had different forms during that time, but I committed to focusing on it fully in 2015 because a lot of sentences started presenting themselves again. The three parts were not written chronologically, I wrote Part Three (trace) quite quickly in 2017 and apart from changing one word I didn’t touch it again. And then other parts I worked on for a while. For example, ‘Channel’ in Part One (substance) was not doing what I wanted it to do for ages, there were a lot of versions. At one point it was called ‘Bexhill’ until it eventually dawned on me that I was talking about the English Channel, and I was also trying to channel six-year-old memories out of my body.

Colour

GL One of the most striking components of the exhibition at the Nunnery is that you've painted the walls in indigo-coloured paint. It completely contains the works, and encapsulates them. And indigo also features in air through the endpapers and the ribbon, which you've dyed by hand. In fact, you reference colour a lot in air, it is full of colours when you look closely but for now, let’s focus on the significance of indigo for you.

MA There’s a cultural specificity to my interest in indigo because the maternal side of my family was from Abeokuta. It is renowned for its indigo dyeing tradition and trade, which historically is passed down by women. As part of my research I am interested in the materials we use to leave the written mark on the page and started thinking about ink and, by association, pigment. I didn’t want to be arbitrary about this, and because I am looking at autotheory, I started thinking about the possibility that I might have some residual, latent, hidden, forgotten indigo inheritance flowing through me and started making indigo vats and making paper and dyeing the paper to see what might surface. And then during one of our conversations with Sophie (Hill) about installation ideas, she suggested we work with Dulux to make a paint colour for the walls. Incredible! Plus, I got to name it!

GL Because of the extended timeline of the production of the work, the show and the wider extension of your life, the project also feels like a vat where meaning has emerged over time. On so many occasions, you've been connecting why this is like this or that is like that; there’s been a lot of sense-making in the process of developing living in fear of quicksand.

MA Yes, this is so true. You mentioned the idea of muscle memory in a previous conversation we had, and the notion that we imagine we are drawn to interests accidentally, when it’s possible our bodies are remembering something of the people who came before us.

GL It’s a fascinating and intriguing possibility… Can I ask about making the indigo dye?

MA The process is intriguing and tricky because the water in the vat has to be reduced – meaning devoid of oxygen. Once you’ve added all the ingredients, you need to stir the solution gently to avoid introducing any air. The solution is not actually blue, it’s a pale, greeny yellow. It is only after you have immersed what you are dyeing, taken it out again and reintroduced it into the air – oxidised it – that the chemical reaction can occur, and that’s when the blue begins to appear. There is such an interesting relationship between this process and the concepts in air – it's all been very unexpectedly symbiotic. The metaphorical relationship between the vat being with and without oxygen and how I have used punctuation and spacing in air to invoke breathlessness, inhaling and exhaling, not being able to breathe, holding your breath.

GL Especially as air was conceived before you started investigating indigo.

MA This is the joy of research and long-term projects; you have time to pay very close attention to these connections.

Voices

GL I want to touch on the film and sound pieces – 1973 and there is no sticking plaster for this gaping wound – which feature your voice, specifically your singing voice, as well as other voices speaking your written words. Why did the voice become a key feature of both these pieces? There are interesting echoes in terms of the voices captured within the archival material as well.

MA During an early stage in the development of 1973, I invited a group of people to read Part One of air and to record themselves reciting any extracts that resonated for them. It was an experiment, something I wanted to test out. And I've always had this idea of doing a piece of work about singing. There is a word you used to describe both pieces, which I find beautiful – you said they are charged. And to me, this sums up the reason for the voices. They immediately convey an emotional dimension that amplifies the words I have written. And the repetition that occurs in 1973 is marking time, holding and marking time. The voices are saying all is not well. The same with there is no sticking plaster for this gaping wound; my voice punctures the space to unsettle the reader.

GL There's a choreography to it as all these voices come together. When you first watch 1973 you hear one voice and assume that it must be the protagonist of the film, and then you hear a totally different voice repeating the words of the first. After a third voice, you start questioning who the words belong to; there’s a shift in temporality. And the singing adds to this shift.

MA Singing, as well as reading books, was something I did a lot as a child, singing to myself. I’m thinking again about what we inherit; we inherit an intonation in our voices. So, my tone of voice is my own but also holds something of my parents, and by introducing my voice in this way means there is an echo of them in these two works. The singing is very much connected to trying to retrieve memories for me – of my younger self, as a daughter within a family.

GL One of the exhibition’s most vital messages is an exploration of how we conceal particular experiences and how society also expects us to do so. You've engaged with, in your words, the unspoken, hidden and obscured and use this phrase to describe your artistic interests. Here they are used as devices to powerful effect. Can you say a little more about this?

MA There’s a natural curiosity when something is hidden or unspoken or obscured. In life, I have had to learn to pay very close attention because often situations were very unclear, unsafe. I became an expert at focusing on what was not being said, and the emotional dynamics that were playing out in all the silences. This is bound up with the fragmentary nature of memory and what is lost when stories of a life are not held, retold and preserved in the minds of others. Grappling with a not knowing has become part of who I am, has formed me, and it has a very complex potency. My concerns in living in fear of quicksand are very much about how society decides who is allowed to speak up, how it silences people, dictating what can and cannot be said and by whom, and what emotions can be displayed by whom. Who is seen and unseen.

Maria Amidu’s artistic concerns are influenced by the complexities of the relational – between people, and between people and place. Through writing, printmaking, artist’s books, audio visual works and sometimes glassmaking she tries to substantiate what might be going on in collective situations, paying specific attention to what is hidden, obscured or unspoken. She is currently undertaking doctoral research in the School of Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art and the title of her project is ‘Making that remembers: a correspondence between emotion and material’. iniva and Towner Eastbourne have recently awarded Maria the 2023 Future Collect commission. She is developing new work for an exhibition at Towner in early 2024. Works by Maria can also be seen at the Stuart Hall Library in: Untitled, an INDEX exhibition of works in progress by Maria Amidu, until 28 April 2023. www.mariaamidu.co.uk 

Gemma Lloyd is an independent curator specialising in new commissions for the gallery and the public realm. She works across contemporary practices and is interested in the research afforded by working closely with artists, and the unseen processes that guide a work from the studio to the public sphere. She is an English language copy editor for the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Nida Art Colony, the publishing house Two Silences, and the biannual magazine *as a Journal. Gemma is an associate of DACS, Daily Life Ltd. and Bridget Sawyers Limited. She is co-curator of the exhibition Earth Spells: Witches of the Anthropocene, on show at RAMM, Exeter until 7 May 2023.

Maria would like to thank everyone who has supported the development and realisation of living in fear of quicksand: Gemma Lloyd, Terry Adams, Andrea Cunningham, Tamsin Bookey, Sophie Hill, Helen Simms, Gary Stewart, Trevor Mathison, Rob Hadrill, Claire Mason, Seung Sing Sou, Sanjida Alam, Genova Messiah, Abidemi Ibitoye, Leah Jun Oh, Emma Rumford, Andrew Lewis, Medha Chotai, Akila Richards, Marianne Shillingford, Jonathan Bassett, Martina Margetts, Gilane Tawadros, Liz Whitehead, Penelope Thompson, Stephen Beddoe and Russell Martin.