The image painted into the surface is a screen-captured image from a BBC documentary film covering historic events across England titled The Summer of Heat (1976). As the film nears...
The image painted into the surface is a screen-captured image from a BBC documentary film covering historic events across England titled The Summer of Heat (1976). As the film nears its end, the narrator describes the pride experienced among Afro-Caribbean Londoners after the community resistance to police overreach and excessive force during the Notting Hill Carnival celebration. A drummer sings into a microphone and plays on a drum set as part of a band while surrounded by standing and clapping audience members. The image printed onto the vinyl depicts audience members at the famous Jazz performance venue Club Alabam on Central Avenue in Los Angeles in 1953. From the 1930s to the 1950s Central Avenue in Los Angeles and the nightclubs and hotels there served as a cultural centre for Black L.A., featuring live Jazz music and dance performance.
The work’s title considers the historically powerful influence of the African drum as an instrument for music making and tool for communicating messages and signals among people who spoke different languages. The title also refers to one of the oldest African artefacts held in the collection of the British Museum, the West African Akan Drum (Talking Drum), the Atumpan, which originated from the 17th-century Akan people of present day Ghana.
“Masters’ fear of the communicative power of drums was confirmed by the Stono rebellion of 1739 in which rebels used a drum to signal each other. Slaves were subsequently banned from using drums. The same drum which beat for subjugation could beat for rebellion. Slavers manipulated the culturally vital African Drum to subjugate black slaves through dance. The power of an instrument like the Akan Drum to communicate and unify persisted from Africa to North America.” - Emma Higgins, Early Modern History in 28 Objects A Digital Exhibit by Fordham University Students, History Dept. Fall 2018
The surface of this work is assembled from thick, raw cotton duck canvas, brown corduroy, and joined together by a zigzag of folded white canvas across the centre of the entire piece. Some of the white paper squares have been scraped into and pulled away, mimicking the gesture of rapid drawing or scribbling. The process of soaking the white paper bags in water with black paper bags over a number of hours or days leaves the white bags faintly stained with the colours in the black dyes; pink and yellow. The “white” halftone lines that portray the performing singer/drummer are tinted with gradients of pale lavender and blue pigments meant to interact with yellows, pinks, and fluorescent magentas of the paper and painted into the surface at varying levels of chromatic intensity.