Painting in the Sky, Indigo Blue by Gilane Tawadros

New essay by Gilane Tawadros, Founding Director, iniva and Director, Whitechapel Gallery. Commissioned on the occasion of Maria Amidu’s Future Collect solo exhibition in the perpetual back and forth at Towner Eastbourne (4 May - 8 September 2024). Painting in the Sky, Indigo Blue features in the accompanying exhibition publication.

‘We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. This may be the measure of our lives.’

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1993

'One autumn evening in our steamy kitchen looking out of our open balcony door I ask her "who painted the sky in..."

I can see her wonder. I do not hear her voice.'

Maria Amidu, air (2022)

Words contained within paper-thin airmail sheets. Words painstakingly crafted into short texts. Words handwritten, gummed down along the seams and dispatched by air. Words performed by a cast of friends who recite the same words differently: at varying speeds, with altered emphases and inflected by their distinctive accents.

Words emanating from speakers in a gallery space, the volume turned down so low that you have to strain to make out what is being said and even then you don't catch everything. Words read out haltingly in a foreign tongue. Words torn from a journal and scattered haphazardly. Words etched by laser onto abaca fibre paper which seems so fragile but is surprisingly resilient.

Where some artists use paint or pastel to make their artworks, in recent years, Maria Amidu has used writing as the material, form and content of her artistic practice. Slippery and unreliable, words recur in Maria's work in different forms: written, spoken, etched.

Sometimes, they are solid and tangible. At other times, they are ephemeral and hard to decipher. Often, they are both solid and ephemeral at the same time. Maria treats language as though it has the same properties as glass (she studied Glass and Ceramics at the Royal College of Art): simultaneously robust and delicate, alternately transparent and opaque. Attracted by the contradictory qualities of both, Maria seems to suggest that their properties are analogous to our attributes as human beings, fragile and strong, both at the same time, and with the potential to transform from one state to another. Maria's chosen materials have magical, alchemical qualities: tiny particles of sand that run through your fingers and are difficult to hold are transformed through the glass-making process into a hard material which can be moulded into solid vessels; individual words that are spoken hurriedly and carried away by the wind can also be shaped into concrete sentences that measure out human lives and experiences.

In a long, corridor space at Towner Eastbourne, an incidental space that visitors might happen upon accidentally, Maria has installed the work episode(s) (2024). A line of indigo-dyed paper and laser-etched prints has been pinned to each facing wall. Two lines of text written on top of one other. It's not really a conversation; rather two irreconcilable perspectives, one laid over the other. As if confused by these two competing narratives, the laser printer has mangled the words so that the text becomes difficult to read. As time goes on, the words, scarcely hanging on to the paper, start to fall to the ground, some singly, others in small clusters, dinging together. Words carelessly uttered, now falling off the printed page, disintegrating, only to be trodden underfoot unwittingly by visitors to the exhibition. episode(s) addresses the failure of communication and the ways in which, in spite of apparently speaking the same language, we can still fail to understand, still hurt each other. As visitors walk past the line of prints, their movement disturbs the words from their place. Little threads of text hanging precariously, tumble to the floor like words carelessly uttered, without knowing how these will land. Some may perhaps be picked up underfoot, adhering to a visitor's shoes and be carried from one part of the gallery to another, unintentionally displaced and relocated.

Gallery 1, adjacent to the corridor, is littered with hundreds of sheets of abaca fibre paper, lying in layers one on top of the other. The text has been printed in two separate halves, placed apart from one another so that the full script cannot be read in its entirety. Severed in two, the two halves of the paper cannot be made whole again; the rupture is permanent. It cannot be sutured.

We become aware of something missing, an absence which infuses the work, an irretrievable loss. The title of this installation piece is 26,778,780 minutes (2024). 6o minutes to every hour; 24 hours to every day; 365 days to every year. The minutes, hours and days, like the layered sheets of abaca paper, map out a life lived and time elapsed. The number of minutes has been counted out precisely, measuring the distance of time from a specific historical event. It is the only thing that we can confidently count on. Everything else the artist offers up to us is fragmentary and elusive. Maria's artworks, in both form and content, remind us of how tentative our hold is on the past, how unreliable recollection can be and how difficult it is to reconstruct past events and memories.

We grasp at straws to extract some meaning from the work. Indigo paper and indigo paint: the colour indigo has some significance perhaps? Maria told me about a place in Nigeria called Abeokuta ('refuge among the rocks'), the capital of Ogun state in southwestern Nigeria, which sits on the east bank of the Ogun River. It is here that Yoruba women started Adire ('tie and dye') production over a century ago, an indigo-dyed cloth. It may be a tenuous connection, linking an artist brought up on the south-east Sussex coast with a continent thousands of miles away but I become more persuaded of the link when I hear the artist's voice emanating from speakers installed alongside the prints. She is pausing and stumbling over her words, saying something in a language I can't undersand. Maria suggests a connection that has been ruptured and broken; like her halting attempts to speak the Yoruba that she once understood as a child; or the abaca paper that has been carefully prepared, and then her writing intentionally printed as two separate halves. These are connections that can never be retrieved or restored, but they persist nonetheless.

Every afternoon at 4pm, throughout the duration of the exhibition, visitors to Towner Eastbourne are invited to participate in a collective act of repair and care. Air blown into the gallery lifts the prints from their designated positions. The sheets rise up off the plinths and fall back down haphazardly. The artist has no control over where they land, lifted from their intended locations, they are now out of place. In what she describes as a 'soft performative role', Maria asks the audience to put the prints back into place, restoring her fragile artwork through a gesture of tenderness and collective care. In contrast to the careless destruction which the artist invites in relation to episode(s), Maria creates here an opportunity for visitors to participate in an act of restoration that operates at the level of both the physical and the psychological. Having been unwittingly complicit in the destruction of episode(s), audience members are offered the possibility of making good, of returning the 26,778,780 minutes prints that have been dislodged and dislocated, restoring the order of things here in the gallery space.

Against the backdrop of wider global debates about making reparation, Maria's work returns the question of reparation to a more personal and intimate context, asking: Can we repair our personal histories? Can we recover lost connections and ties through an act of bodily reparation, mining our bodies and minds for embodied traces of the past through voice, colour, touch? Can we extend care to fragile objects that we do not possess or have a claim to? And can we do so as an act of collective solidarity?

With air (1998-2022) - an artistic project that has evolved through different iterations over the years including an artists book and changing installations incorporating text, image and sound - Maria explored how writing can be transformed into visual work, translating elusive memories into physical objects and environments. Revolving around a sudden death in her family that took place in east London in the early 1970S, air confronts the impossibility of grasping historical events with any certainty or precision and underscores the fallibility of memory. Circling around this childhood trauma, Maria probes what is 'hidden, obscured or un-spoken' in various social situations, in different locations and moments in time across a number of years. In the artist's film work 1973 (2022), a group of readers related to the artist personally and professionally, narrate the same text written by Maria over and again, reading out fragmented recollections in different accents and tones of voice. Through this performative act of repetition and difference, Maria reminds us that there is no singular or definitive memory or perception of the past but several disjointed versions which co-exist and which rarely unfold in an orderly, temporal sequence from the beginning, through the middle, to the end. In her solo exhibition, living in fear of quicksand (2023) at Nunnery Gallery in east London, the volume of 1973 was intentionally set low, compelling visitors to lean into the work to try and make out what was being said, unable to comprehend more than a few, broken-up words.

In an adjacent vitrine work, entitled things I want known and also do not want to share (2021), the artist assembled an accumulation of 237 typewritten fragments of sentences on delicate white paper that articulate unspeakable emotions' and appear as though they have been torn from a journal and scattered haphazardly in the glass case. Some words are legible, others are smudged or hidden from view. While many of Maria's works derive from deeply personal and intimate episodes in her life, her work refuses to enter into a space of confessional art-making, preferring instead to create works which compel us as viewers to examine our own traumas and wounds and our reticence or inability to speak about them.

The exhibition in the perpetual back and forth at Towner Eastbourne is the latest chapter in an ambitious and decades-long artistic project by Maria Amidu that reckons with the most difficult and painful aspects of the human condition: grief, absence, separation and displacement. Deploying writing as the material for her artistic practice and recognising, as Toni Morrison observes, that language 'may be the measure of our lives’, Maria nevertheless recognises the unreliability of language, which, like memory, cannot be relied upon to carry unassailable truths or certainties. As visitors to her exhibitions, we have to work hard to read, decipher and understand the traces of the artist's own history that criss-cross time and geography. Ultimately, these traces, like the artist's own recollections, remain opaque, fragmentary and elusive. Eschewing an individualised and confessional mode of art-making,

Maria has chosen instead to invite her audience into her artwork both physically and metaphorically, asking us to address our own traumas and desires and to care for ourselves and others in an act of collective care and solidarity. Most importantly, perhaps, Maria's work carries an indomitable faith in the beauty of things that cannot be extinguished by not knowing.

The colour of the sky is still a beautiful, deep indigo blue, even if we don't know who painted it in.

Copyright © Gilane Tawadros, 2024