The forgotten Studio: Poetry and Art, Grace Nichols and Chris Ofili

Monday 27 August 2012

Poetry and Art, Grace Nichols and Chris Ofili

Grace Nichols

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia;

Poet Grace Nichols was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1950. After working in Guyana as a teacher and journalist, she immigrated to the UK in 1977. Much of her poetry is characterised by Caribbean rhythms and culture, and influenced by Guyanese and Amerindian folklore.

Her first collection of poetry, I is a Long-Memoried Woman won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has written several further books of poetry and a novel for adults, Whole of a Morning Sky, 1986. Her books for children include collections of short stories and poetry anthologies. Her latest work, of new and selected poems, is "Startling the Flying Fish", 2006. Many GCSE students in the UK have studied her work on WWII. Her religion is Christianity after she was influenced by the UK's many religions and multi-cultural society.

Poems from

The Fat Black Woman's Poems
by Grace Nichols

Synopsis;

Grace Nichols gives us images that stare us straight in the eye, images of joy, challenge, accusation. Her 'fat black woman' is brash; rejoices in herself; poses awkward questions to politicians, rulers, suitors, to a white world that still turns its back. Grace Nichols writes in a language that is wonderfully vivid yet economical of the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, of loving, of 'the power to be what I am, a woman, charting my own futures'.

The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping

Shopping in London winter
is a real drag for the fat black woman
going from store to store
in search of accommodating clothes
and de weather so cold

Look at the frozen thin mannequins
fixing her with grin
and de pretty face salesgals
exchanging slimming glances
thinking she don’t notice

Lord is aggravating

Nothing soft and bright and billowing
to flow like breezy sunlight
when she walking

The fat black woman curses in Swahili/Yoruba
and nation language under her breathing
all this journeying and journeying

The fat black woman could only conclude
that when it come to fashion
the choice is lean

Nothing much beyond size 14

Looking at Miss World

Tonight the fat black woman
is all agaze
will some Miss (plump at least
if not fat and black) uphold her name

The fat black woman awaits in vain
slim after slim aspirant appears
baring her treasures in hopeful despair
this the fat black woman can hardly bear

And as the beauties yearn
and the beauties yearn
the fat black woman wonders
when will the beauties
ever really burn

O the night wears on
the night wears on
judges mingling with chiffons

The fat black woman gets up
and pours some gin
toasting herself as a likely win

Art work by Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili's new show is a lesson in learning to be free. Not of the shadows cast by other artists, but of his own. Early success makes some artists grow scared of their shadows; they get so stuck with the thing they have become known for that they are paralysed, unable to find a way forward.

Now in his early 40s, the Trinidad-based British artist recognises that the coherent development of his work isn't something he need worry about. He is centred and confident enough to know that the work will tell the story. At the end of the 1990s, having become famous for using his signature elephant dung for some years, Ofili told me he was retreating to the studio and staying out of the limelight. By then he had won the Turner prize (in 1998; he was the first black artist to do so), and been vilified by New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who in 1999 objected to the Brooklyn Museum of Art showing his black Virgin Mary.
But he didn't escape attention or controversy: in 2005, Tate bought Ofili's 2002 work The Upper Room, a complex installation of 13 paintings in a shrine-like space, designed by the architect David Adjaye. Ofili was a Tate trustee at the time.
Read more here