Sonia Boyce: New and Recent Works

New and Recent Works was a solo show of sound pieces and drawings. Works in the exhibition took as a starting point a number of the black female pop-stars I had been collating.

The exhibition included works on paper and diamante collages, stencils, drawings, and paintings, and were accompanied by reproduced images of the stars or their record covers. Assembled together they appear like a wall of precious teenage fan club images. A large scale mixed media installation, Foreign 2004 added sound collated from songs recorded over each other. The piece is a celebration of the voices everyone knows consciously or subconsciously. Thereby it defines music as part of our language codes.

Within this exhibition I also explore the inclusion of backing singers who rarely receive a mention, which I understood as a critique of the invisibility of much female talent.

Though significantly different, this exhibition linked the aesthetic of my earlier work with materials like hair to my research and art practice derived from the interest in popular music and black female singers.

My research, involving collaboration with other artists as an integral part of my practice, was aided by a NESTA Fellowship ‘Questioning the role of the artist and audience’ granted in March of 2004.