Who speaks? Who listens? by Martina Margetts

Writer Martina Margetts responds to 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).

living in fear of quicksand is a mixed-media representation of one individual’s life. Its subject is the decades-long search by the artist Maria Amidu for an understanding of her past. Although professional artists present their work in public, Maria is guided by a quotation from the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ‘All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.’ The artist interweaves these facets in the exhibition’s two venues in East London, which provide a complementary framework: one a busy public space for archival and library enquiry, the other an art gallery which was formerly a convent, a space of private contemplation.

The exhibition layouts with their wallchart, display cases, table, paperwork, film and book are deceptive in their apparently ordered calm, for Maria is exploring difficult terrain. In one exhibit, she notes ‘experiences I’d suppressed because of the attitudes of others, people who could not tolerate the truth of things I needed to say’. Through artworks and documents, visitors become aware of life-changing events, institutions and behaviours that induce anxiety and misunderstanding. The artist’s intention is to prompt consideration of what any individual knows or understands about their life and those they hold close. The journey of artist and audience becomes entwined. This ability to share in the feelings of others – empathy – is how societies are sustained and how art evolves.

Maria’s terrain may be mapped by a method anthropologist Tim Ingold would call ‘wayfaring’, that is, a route followed not by information or intellect but by the senses of vision, hearing and touch. This physical orienteering invokes a restless mobility of the mind, seeking to apprehend Maria’s experience of life. All the exhibits are layerings of thought and feeling through word, image, object, space, colour, sound and light. There are some facts of Maria’s life, but these are intentionally scattered, obscured or hard to decipher, because it is the affect of a life, not its record, that is the subject of the exhibition. The word ‘quicksand’ in the exhibition’s title is therefore central to the performative interaction, a deliberate state of flux. Quicksand is liquified soil which becomes unable to support weight, because water becomes trapped in it and cannot escape. The soil can appear stable until a sudden change in pressure or shock initiates liquefaction. By association, human beings may appear to bear weight, then suddenly disintegrate. It is an everyday fate of the human soul. 

Inside the Nunnery Gallery there are five works of art made over the past two years (except air, a book written between 2015 and 2022 after a seventeen-year gestation) and the titles are collectively perplexing: 1973; things I want known and also do not want to share; air; Sunday night and there is no sticking plaster for this gaping wound. The works are respectively materialised as a film, a display case of shredded paper, artist’s book, bespoke paint colour and sound work. The form of the film 1973 echoes quicksand, offering an unstable sequence of uncontextualised slow-moving images, including clothes on a line, shoes abandoned in the sand, a fragment of yellow cloth, a photograph of three small sisters and a rosary of bright blue beads. The successive voices of twelve unseen narrators intone the same fragmented memories of a single day, embodying the bafflement of loss. The narration is especially poignant against the film’s transient movement of sunlight, billowing curtains on a balcony, and rhythmic waves of the sea. 

The film, characteristic of Maria’s art, is full of equivocation – liminal spaces oscillating between imagination and reality, sound and silence, movement and stillness, light and shadow, tangible objects and fugitive voices, air shifting by turns through sun, cloud, breeze. In seeking moorings, the visitor encounters the artist’s book air, apparently more solid and permanent in its boxed casing than the film 1973. In the event, it is a companion chronology of reflection in the realm of memory. Sitting at the table on the hard chair, scrutinising the beautiful but fraught book, the visitor – as if the erstwhile nun with her votive text – becomes immersed in empathetic emotion.

In the book, Maria quotes the US writer Audre Lorde: ‘Feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge’. This insight is demonstrated in Maria’s passages of writing in the book. She structures her prose, her choice of words and phrasing in vivid style to pinpoint what a given experience felt like, for example a haphazard car journey, the love of her mother, moments  enjoying life, the thirst for knowledge. The book also reflects on relationships and class and power relations through childhood, teenage and adult years. Since the year 1973, when Maria was six, a jar of watery sand recurs like a unsettling Proustian madeleine, first tight shut to ward off reality; later, ‘upturned’ after a burglary at gunpoint in St. Augustine, Port of Spain; later still the following: ‘The jar is now in smithereens, powdered glass and weighted sand scratching and pulling through my insides. The water, held for so long, is slow and thick and has merged with all the small lives that keep leaving me in dark, sodden lumps.’

These echoes Maria sets up in the exhibition are deliberate: each textural, gestural work folds into the experience of the other. The jar has been mentioned before, in part of the narration in the film 1973:  

This is the day the sand and water are put in the jar.
Before the unbalancing in St. Augustine, six-year-old
hands carefully squeezing the lid shut and hiding it
away after the whispers turned into full-grown voices
trying to explain why they had been speaking in hushed
tones outside.

Clouds, too, which are transient in the film, re-appear as a black and white cluster on the cover of the book and on the exhibition poster. They materialise a weight of feeling: an obscuring of clarity which lingers and hangs heavy, a wish they may drift and disappear. This temporality of clouds is one of the exhibition’s key metaphors. Another reverberation is the refrain of the artist’s disembodied singing voice that intermittently permeates the whole space of the Nunnery Gallery. In the film, David Cassidy’s hit song from 1973, Daydreamer, reiterates the exhibition’s leitmotif of longing:

But now you're gone I'm just a daydreamer
I'm walking in the rain
Chasing after rainbows I may never find again
Life is much too beautiful to live it all alone
Oh how much I need someone to call my very own

Elsewhere, every 20 minutes, the artist’s recorded voice comes from beneath the table holding the book air, just for a minute singing a fragment of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Mack and Katie Kissoon (1971). It is important that both songs seem initially familiar, part of everyday life, popular, so that the wavering intonation and lyric fragments in the artist’s renderings reinforce the disconcerting unease – the fear of quicksand – that increasingly permeates the exhibition space and content.  

Finding a voice is Maria’s core purpose. Against the whispers, the artist is speaking out. Each work assists in materialising ‘voice’ differently, intensifying feeling as an embodied way of knowing.  Added to word, sound and image, through book, film and song, is colour. Sunday night is a unique colour of paint which Maria has developed and named with Dulux, now in commercial production. Whilst colour in all art is a symbolic language that ‘speaks’ of emotion, here this immersive colour is unique to the artist, conveying a particular meaning through both hue and process. Indigo does not dissolve naturally in water, the deep blue emerging through a chemical interaction between water and air, a process of oxidation which sees the colour evolve in a volatile state through yellow and green to blue. In another of the exhibition’s echoes, Maria relates this indigo dyeing process ‘with and without oxygen’ to ‘how I have used punctuation and spacing in air to invoke breathlessness, inhaling and exhaling, not being able to breathe, holding your breath.’

The artist develops this further in things I want known but also do not want to share, in which she aims ‘to attend to what gets stifled, or whispered, or muttered, or mumbled. Either way, it’s what makes us who we are’. A vitrine is heaped with shredded pieces of the softest Japanese handmade paper, scattered with Maria’s words and phrases made almost unintelligible through constant erasures. ‘What gets stifled’ is hauntingly evoked, here and there words of disappointment, sorrow, exasperation pulsing through the paper. It is not detritus but precious residue: the fragmentation and imperfection of this fragile installation allude to its fugitive meanings. The gaps, spaces and voids in form and content convey the incompleteness of understanding by which human beings live their lives.

The artist’s self-awareness reveals an existential truth, which is that public, private and secret are registers of an interior self that must navigate the exterior world. The apparently self-sufficient individual must necessarily reach an accommodation with the experiences of everyday life, always buffeted by memory and human inter-dependence. Maria’s practices of art, writing and doctoral research are therefore a way of contesting the truth of the self an individual presents to the world as well as the truth of experience in communion with others. This is the common ground with artists and writers such as Mark Bradford, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Abbas Zahedi, Tina Campt and Rebecca Solnit, whose unflinching gaze refracts our fragmented world.

This co-dependency between individual and community is what gives charged meaning to the part of Maria’s exhibition at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives.  Instead of viewing the plans from archives about the Lincoln Estate, where the Amidu family lived, as factual records, it is more revealing to engage with them as active agents of human experience. The mass of decisions made by planners and politicians in relation to the origins, construction and continuing legacy of the Lincoln Estate – brilliantly brought to life through a timeline, architects’ drawings and typed letters covering stages of public objection, amendment, negotiation and approval – reveal a complex narrative of emotions and compromise. From its 1950s origins to the present day, the rise, fall and recovery of the fabric and society of the Lincoln Estate shows that homes and communities are as idealised in the imagination and as vulnerable in reality as each human being who dwells in them.

Two cases at this venue display material specific to the artist’s own peripatetic life: a pile of files of secreted notes relating to the book air and records of letters, reports and comments from health and social authorities, accompanied by teenage memorabilia and a story Maria wrote while in council care about shape-shifting children, a confluence of reading, writing and daydreaming as tools towards knowledge and insight. The freedom to be oneself, unencumbered by assumption and control, is a birthright too often denied. The exhibition asks: who speaks and who listens? These are fundamental questions for every human being, which is why Maria compels our empathetic immersion in her art.

Martina Margetts is a writer, curator, advisor and lecturer on contemporary material culture. Former Editor of Crafts and Senior Tutor in Critical & Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, recent essays include Material Perceptions (Arnoldsche 2018), Post-Craft (Sternberg Press 2022), Crafts (Magdalena Abakanowicz, Tate Modern 2022–3) and the Journal of Modern Craft (Strange Clay, Hayward Gallery 2023).