Highlights

BLOODSOUND, 2022 by Zinzi Minott

BLOODSOUND confronts the rupture, the glitch and the disturbances which seek to obfuscate truth; foregrounds the struggle from which sound came, and honours the hands that produced it; is an homage, a protest, a feeling and a bleeding. An attendance to the enslaved [now ancestral] bodies, descendant bodies and sonic bodies that our collective survivals and resistances rest upon.

Through positioning the memory and technology of the Soundsystem within a gallery context, Minott questions the systemic frameworks which culturally flatten Black sonic technologies, valued only for its fidelity to sound and passage to pleasure, yet removing the people, history and contexts from which it came.

Minott presents the Soundsystem as a fugitive entity; a living and active agent grounded in its complex history of insurgent and resistant sonic dance practises. Forged by communal perseverance, economic endurance and the advanced phonographic technologies of Jamaica, Minott reflects on the underground movements of Caribbean sound cultures. Presenting possibility through the encounter of the vibration, she seeks to refuse the dissonances which separate the sonic from liberatory and reparative motions. Such multiplicities are encapsulated through the loud, haptic, visceral, explosive and auditory phenomena of the Soundsystem.

Minott centres this body of work through a visuality which illuminates the acute and nuanced [corpo]realities of Blackness “as a colour, experience and culture,” entangling the experiences of class, queerness, gender and the contemporary legacies of transatlantic slavery.

Recruiting immersive sound and swathes of Blackness, Minott forms linkages of autobiography and collective histories to irrefutably connect what is seen, felt and then, known.

The Double Act, 2023 - 2024 by Madi Acharya-Baskerville

The Double Act is created in response to the theme of ‘Parade’, for the First Plinth Award. 2023. This work is composed of two figures that are dancing together in joyous harmony, enjoying each other’s company. There is an emphasis on using reclaimed materials, driftwood collected from the coast for the platform and discarded textiles for other aspects of the piece.

The figures are based on the natural world, trees which resemble the human form. This upbeat, colourful work at first glance resembles a humorous party scene but there are more serious undertones, namely the pressing need for us to value our environment, tackle climate change and value diversity.

Materials: Reclaimed wood, vintage textiles, steel, jesmonite, bronze, resin

'don't go chasing waterfalls', 2025 by Katrina Cowling

Steel, aluminium, brass, stalks of wheat, concrete council slabs, motor, arduino, piano wire, electricity 

Photo credit: Andy Keate

The Cot: Prima Materia, 2025 by Larain Briggs

This work began with a small, freeform drawing on canvas (20cm x 30cm), which evolved into a painting. I then mounted the painting onto a wood panel effectively extending the picture plane, a method I had previously employed in the works The Blackening and Beyond the Blackening. Black-painted wood batons were layered onto the surface to expand the labyrinthine image in the painting, blurring the line between image and structure. Lying the work on the floor created a sense of a descending vortex. This downward motion suggested a return to an origin point. I built a custom plinth to display the piece, eventually extending the structure upwards to form a cot, with the extended painting as its base.

The image of the cot relates to my ongoing trauma therapy (EMDR). In EMDR sessions, I am required to repeatedly revisit my earliest memory of a specific moment as an infant in my cot as the starting point of each session. This memory initiates the processing of trauma, which is a painful and challenging process where I relive numerous traumatic experiences. My EMDR experiences parallel my practice that explores processing trauma through the creative process, focusing on Jungian alchemical individuation.  In this work, the unsettling contrast between the cot as a symbol of infancy and origin, and the blackened, burnt aesthetic of nigredo, represents dissolution, psychic fragmentation, and confrontation with the archetypal shadow.

The Cot structure symbolises the beginning of individuation and represents the prima materia as the starting point of the alchemical transformation process. The assemblage, when completed, was charred with a blowtorch to transform the work further and extend the concept of nigredo. The result is a cot that appears scorched or destroyed, evoking the death of innocence, personal loss, and grief. The work carries layered meanings. It symbolises a return to the origin, a symbolic container for trauma, and a site of transformation.

References

Jung, C.G. and Jung, C.G. (1977) Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. 2d ed. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press (The collected works of C.G. Jung, v. 14).