Ingrid Pollard is a British media artist and researcher who has developed a social practice concerned with representation, using portraiture photography and traditional landscape imagery to explore social constructs such as Britishness or racial difference. While she became known for her photographic series, she has also throughout her career been uncovering unseen and hidden histories in a variety of practices from printmaking, drawing, mixed media and film.
Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slow Turning situates Pollard’s practice in a wider context and weaves together her personal story and Caribbean heritage with broader narratives of post war black settlement and photographic history. Continuing the theme of exposing what is hidden, Pollard challenges in her works the representation and derogatory portrayals of the ‘black figure’.
For four decades, Pollard’s important photographic collages have offset traditionally idyllic representations of Britain with unseen legacies of xenophobia and exclusion. Pastoral Interlude (1988) places the Black figure within an imagined picturesque setting, undermining perceptions of ‘urban’ and ‘authentic rural’. Seaside Series (1989) combines cyphers of coastal tourism with stories of historic and contemporary immigration to the UK. More recently, Seventeen of Sixty-Eight (2019) documents how the African body is represented in popular signwriting.
Despite Pollard's work being held in several national collections and discussed in every publication on black artists in Britain, the artist is little known to the general public. There is no doubt that her practice and achievements are nationally significant and this first monograph seeks to widen her exposure.
Author Biography:
Fay Blanchard is Head of Exhibitions at MK Gallery. Prior to joining MK Gallery in 2017 Fay worked as Curator, Visual Arts with the British Council (2013-17) curating and managing international exhibitions including: ‘Michael Landy Saints Alive’ (2014-15, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City), ‘Private Utopia: Contemporary Art from Britain’ (2014-15 Japan),‘Grayson Perry: The Vanity of Small Differences’(2016-17 Western Balkans tour) as well as delivering international curatorial professional development resulting in co-curated group exhibitions in Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia.
Gilane Tawadros was the founding Director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) in London, chaired by Professor Stuart Hall. She has spent her career in the visual arts both curating numerous exhibitions and writing extensively on contemporary art. Tawadros is a Trustee and Vice-Chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation, Trustee of the Stuart Croft Foundation, member of the Whitechapel Art Gallery Editorial Board and serves on the Board of European Visual Arts (EVA) and on the Intellectual Property Office's (IPO) Copyright Advisory Panel.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Assistant Professor of African American and Black Diasporic art at Princeton University. She specialises in African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and transatlantic visual culture. Her research focuses on processes of cultural exchange and geographical movement, underpinned by histories of colonialism, and the legacies of these encounters in contemporary art practice. Prior to her appointment at Princeton in 2015 she was Assistant Professor of American Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, and Teaching Fellow at Yale. She has presented papers on Pollard’s work at conferences at Yale, University of Sydney, NYU, and University of Central Lancashire.
Paul Gilroy is a historian, writer and cultural theorist and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at UCL (2019). Prior to UCL, he taught at South Bank University, Essex University, Goldsmiths, University of London, Yale University, London School of Economics and King's College London. Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the Holberg Prize. He is known for his influential studies on black cultural expression on both sides of the Atlantic; the cultural history of postcolonial societies; and the sociology of ethnicity, race and racism in Britain.
Mason Leaver-Yap is currently an Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and the co-founder of LUX Scotland, an artist’s moving image distribution agency. From 2014-2017 they created and produced the Walker Moving Image Commissions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Leaver-Yap served as selector and jury for the Turner Prize in 2017 and presented public projects at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London from 2007 to 2009. They have recently worked on projects with artists including Ingrid Pollard, Renée Green and Free Agent Media, Onyeka Igwe, Lin+Lam, Evan Ifekoya, Sunil Gupta and the Estate of Tessa Boffin, Sharon Hayes and Mathew Parkin, Iman Issa, Rachel O’Reilly, Andrea Büttner, Kat Anderson, Jamie Crewe, Beatrice Gibson with CAConrad and Eileen Myles.
Cheryl Finley is Associate Professor of Art History at Cornell University. She holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies and History of Art from Yale University. An art historian, curator and contemporary art critic, Dr. Finley has contributed essays and reviews to Aperture, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, American Quarterly and Art Forum. Her prolific critical attention to photography has produced the co-authored publications Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2011), Harlem: A Century in Images (Skira Rizzoli, 2010), Diaspora, Memory, Place (Prestel, 2008), and numerous catalogue essays and journal articles on artists such as Lorna Simpson, Hank Willis Thomas, Walker Evans, Joy Gregory, Carrie Mae Weems, Roshini Kempadoo, Deborah Willis and Berenice Abbott.
