‘While the vocals of black British women form the emotional soundtrack to millions of people’s lives, the memory of who these individual women are (or were) is often undervalued.’

‍Feeling Her Way is a ‘noisy exhibition’, says the artist Sonia Boyce OBE. It follows a journey of five musicians - Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Ajudha, Sofia Jernberg, Tanita Tikaram, and composer Errollyn Wallen - at Abbey Road Studios in London as they improvise and interact through voice. We hear them roar and growl, imitating animals, but we also see them on screen, their contributions made visible.

The quintet are Boyce’s very own ‘girl band’; we get a behind-the-scenes look at their first rehearsal in room one. It’s something we wouldn’t normally see, as a practice and first encounter, but also because women, socialised to aspire towards perfection, can struggle with improv.

Its ‘spine’ is her Devotional Collection (1999), a twenty-year project in progress to collect works by Black British women musicians. It’s less an archive, and more a shrine of merch, covering 350 artists from Shirley Bassey and Goldfinger, to Beverley Knight and Jamelia. 

These CDs, records, cassettes are the vertebrae which back this show up. They’re set in pyrite, better known as Fool’s Gold; Boyce draws parallels between the undervaluation of the mineral, and the musical contributions of the women at work.

The rooms are shrouded in Boyce’s geometric, tessellating wallpaper, reproductions of archive photographs taken in Abbey Road. The golden walls reflect their viewers, demanding they participate in the experience and the production of the work overall. 

Moved by William Morris’ ‘seamless’ wallpapers which bring the outside in – and a nudge from her art teacher - Boyce draws a comparison between the repeated patterns in both wallpapers and music. An installation of audio, video and wallpapers, Feeling Her Way is a total work of art – but one the artist considers to be fundamentally about print.

Boyce came of age in the 1970s, in the Black British Art and Caribbean Arts Movement, showing with the likes of Lubaina Himid from the West Midlands to The Africa Centre. She was the first (and youngest) Black British artist to be collected by the Tate, the first Black woman academician at the RA (2016), and the first Black woman to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale 2022 – where Feeling Her Way won her the Golden Lion Prize. (‘She hates that’ that these firsts have come so late, wanting to be acknowledged as an artist ‘in her own right’.)

But in this larger iteration at the Turner Contemporary, the exhibition is less immersive, and intimate. These concerns are close to the artist, who worked concurrently on a Serpentine exhibition with women subject to domestic abuse and violence during COVID lockdowns. 

Indeed, she credits her collective practice, in part, to her experiences living in a Brixton cooperative in the 1980s. ‘I don’t think in terms of painting any more,’ she says, recalling her turn from self-portraiture towards collaboration, education, and teaching.

Through her Devotional Collection, Boyce has ‘become a music geek’, but acknowledges that she learns through and from other people. It implies an altogether different attitude to her artistic process, and knowledge and understanding more widely – one less centred on the artist as hero, and more on the artwork as an experience, demanding participation.

Boyce is no stranger to Margate, having exhibited here in 2004. ‘Like musicians, exhibitions sometimes go on tour,’ a caption intended for children proclaims, nodding to the show’s roots in Venice, and onward trajectory to Leeds. 

Movement and migration ebbs beneath the surface of her works more widely. Again, music seems central, as she draws as much from found objects from her own Barbados in the Caribbean, as the country music of Jim Reeves. 

Alongside ensuring the inclusion of Black British artists, Boyce has been instrumental in getting institutions to reassess (and replace) their existing displays. As such, Feeling Her Way joins a wave of exhibitions of artists like Althea McNish and Ingrid Pollard, paying close attention to the contributions of Black Britons that are often hidden in plain sight.  They encourage us to engage in uncomfortable conversations – ones cushioned by the familiar music that surrounds them.

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Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way is on show at the Turner Contemporary, Margate until 8 May 2023, then Leeds Art Gallery from 25 May to 5 November 2023.‍

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