Helix: We Don't Move in Circles

A large painted globe commissioned by 'The World Re-imagined' for their 2022 public sculpture trail project which explored the histories and legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 'Helix: We Don't Move in Circles' used painted imagery that functioned as a visual meditation on the conceptual and physical relationship between black hair culture, DNA and cosmology.

Kimathi Donkor's artist's statement about 'Helix: We Don't Move in Circles' for 'The World ReImagined'

For most Black people from Africa and the diaspora, a long strand of natural hair forms a helix – like the curved path of a spiral stairway. Yet this helix of hair also can evoke those profound structures which shape the patterns of life. At the microscopic scale is the double helix of DNA — two molecular strands entwined around one another like lovers. But, on a cosmic scale, the helix could also represent the world’s path through space. Whilst Earth’s orbit of the sun is a slight ellipse, the sun itself revolves around the galaxy, which means that the real path of our planet is not a flat ellipse at all.

Relative to the universe, Earth dances a gloriously curly, kinky helix – indeed, a gargantuan fractal set of ‘meta-helices’ as galactic clusters fall into one another through the twinkling blackness. Which brings us back to hair. Having observed the twisting paths of constellations and polymers, could we consider our hair as a metaphor for our long – often torturous – historical journeys that might seem to go around in circles, but which in truth perform an open-ended, infinitely extended looping motion towards a destination about which we know precious little? Could the helix of Black hair represent an odyssey that can never, will never – must never – return and recirculate through the ‘same places’, such as the evil auction block or whipping post.

Finally, it is said that all the infinitesimal subatomic particles which constitute our reality can be described by what physicists and mathematicians call ‘string theory’. And how are we to imagine those hypothetical strings of energy? Never at rest, flat, straight, or dead. But, constantly in a flux of oscillating vibration through multiple incomprehensible dimensions. Curvaceous, flickering, helices. The whirled, reimagined through the painting of Black hair.

Published 2022 @ https://www.theworldreimagined.org/globes/

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