Sonia Boyce

​​ZOÉ WHITLEY: I was in the audience during your conversation with Viv Albertine (of the band, The Slits) and Maria Balshaw (Director of Tate) on International Women’s Day, and it was fascinating to hear your perspective on the education system in Britain and access to the arts. I was thinking we could dip in and out of various works to begin with. The work of yours I’ve had the most recent physical contact with is Tongues from 1997, which was part of the “Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics” exhibition in Singapore. I think it encapsulates so much of your practice, especially in how you involve other people and develop a visual language about communication and connection.

SONIA BOYCE: Sure, I think that’s a really good starting point. Before discussing the impetus for making Tongues, I’d like to talk about it formally. In the ‘90s, I was asking people to perform directly to the camera, creating a direct form of communication. In Tongues, I asked four people if I could photograph the undersides of their tongues, which is quite intimate. You don’t usually see that unless you’re close to someone. The larger-than-life images of the tongue fleshiness seem very pertinent. Do you want me to explain how that work came about? 

ZW: Yes, please.

SB: In 1997, I had a studio at Gasworks in London — and I was encouraged to join the Triangle Arts Network workshop — an international workshop in Cuba. At the same time as that workshop was one of the years of the Havana Biennial, during which I stayed in a Central Havana hotel. One day, a security guard stopped me in the lobby, speaking very fast Spanish. When he realized I couldn’t speak Spanish, he let me go to my room. Later, Cuban artists explained that, as a black woman in the hotel, I was assumed to be either a maid or a sex worker. This shocked me, and I wanted to capture that moment of being misunderstood. When I returned to the UK, I photographed four people: one white male, one black male, one white female, and one black female, showing the undersides of their tongues. I aimed to freeze a moment where someone is trying to articulate but is voiceless. The work itself doesn’t reveal this background, but it conveys the overwhelming sense of the body and the idea of sound that one can’t hear. This theme of voice and voicelessness recurs in other works I’ve done.

ZW: That’s really important because it highlights the emotional layers underneath the slick, finished image of Tongues. I’d love to discuss your auditory and audio-visual journey, like with the Devotional project (begun in 1999), but first, I want to go back to when you first picked up the camera. The first work I encountered was your self-portrait, She Ain’t Holding Them Up, She’s Holding On (Some English Rose) (1986). Can we talk about what those works meant when you were working in a more figurative tradition?

SB: She Ain’t Holding Them Up, She’s Holding On… was the last of those works, which people call paintings but are actually drawings with oil and chalk pastels. I’m the central figure, and that piece was influenced by Frida Kahlo, especially her painting My Grandparents, My Parents and Me (1936). Her self-portraits, where she performs the self for the audience, resonated with me and became a signature move in my work. My drawings from the early eighties were about performing my identity, considering my Caribbean and South American heritage within the UK context. The title’s reference to “Some English Rose” connects this transatlantic journey between the Caribbean and the UK.