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It’s another Tate Collective: Makeup and Art day! This week, see Wendy (@wendysworld-posts_xox) respond to Yinka Shonibare’s ‘The British Library’. 📚⠀ ⠀ ‘Seeing this piece in the flesh, I was in absolute awe. I’ve always loved pattern and colour but this piece was more than that. Dutch wax fabrics is something that I’ve grown up with. My mum wears it every Sunday and I’ve made artworks with it.⠀ ⠀ This installation is a celebration of the continuing contributions immigrants have made in Britain. This piece discusses the definition of British culture and the complexities of dual identity, something that I can relate to being Ghanaian, but born and raised in London.⠀ ⠀ I took aspects of Dutch wax fabric design and constructed into a makeup look that reflects my style of work. It felt right to collaborate with my mother and ask her to pick out what fabrics she wanted me to use. As an immigrant daughter who’s grown up with those fabrics, this look is a celebration of British and African culture and how these influences of can create a unique take on creativity.’ - Wendy

Check out our instagram @TateCollective to watch a video of Wendy’s work coming to life.

Could you paint from your imagination? All of the people in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's work don't exist. She instead works from cuttings, bits of photographs and memories to create her work. Her figures exist outside of time and space. See her works in person from 20 May 2020 at Tate Britain.

10pm Saturday, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 2012

If you could, what moment in your life would you have an artist re-create?

'Couples', Edwina Sandys, 1974

This is Northwest C6 by Catherine Yass. It's part of a series of photographs called 'Invisible City'. Yass took these photos in Tokyo in 2001.

Yass took the title Invisible City from Italo Calvino's book of the same name. The book is a sequences of essays describing fantastical imaginary cities fictionally recounted by Marco Polo to Kublai Kahn.

What's your favourite type of art? This is 'Untitled' by Fiona Rae. Rae’s paintings explore the balance between a controlling principle or concept and the unpredictability (and uncontrollable nature) of expression. ✴️〰️

Born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, and now resident in London, Mona Hatoum often addresses themes of identity and exile in her work. This video 'So Much I Want to Say' consists of still images of her face in close-up, with a pair of male hands covering her mouth which prevent her from speaking. 'My work is about my experience of living in the West as a person from the Third World, about being an outsider, about occupying a marginal position, being excluded, being defined as 'Other' or as one of 'Them', Hatoum has said. 📷✨

'Police Constable Di Worrell (Jane Wall)' is a painting in oil on canvas by the British artist Dawn Mellor. It is one of twenty works in Mellor’s Sirens series, all completed in 2016. The paintings depict female police officers from popular and long-running British television dramas that focus on crime and police work. They have been defaced with additional elements, such as netting, lollipops or water with bubbles, overpainted on their figures, or with disembodied fingers falling out of their mouths.

Mellor’s paintings act as a rebellion against the media industry’s colonisation of public consciousness in relation to attitudes towards women and towards celebrity.

Entitled 2016, the year it was made, this painting depicts a golden boat sinking below the surface of the ocean.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Hambling made the painting slowly throughout 2016, a year in which the media’s portrayal of the European migrant crisis was a key factor in world events that followed. The title therefore relates both to the act of making and the political conditions which surrounded it. See the work in person at Tate Britain.

Fons Americanus is a 13-metre tall working fountain inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London.

Rather than a celebration of the British Empire, Walker’s fountain explores the interconnected histories of Africa, America and Europe. She uses water as a key theme, referring to the transatlantic slave trade and the ambitions, fates and tragedies of people from these three continents. Fantasy, fact and fiction meet at an epic scale. There are only a few weeks left to see Walker’s incredible creation at Tate Modern (Closes 5 April 2020)

This is one of a group of black and white self-portraits in Tate’s collection from the ongoing series Somnyama Ngonyama, in which Zanele Muholi portrays themself in a variety of guises, with a range of props and adornments and against diverse backgrounds.

Muholi began this ongoing series in 2012 while travelling as a way of marking their presence in different spaces. The series, however, took off in 2014 when Muholi decided to create 365 self-portraits, each responding to different physical environments, histories and personal experiences, in order to confront the politics of race and representation. An exhibition of their works will be coming to Tate Modern in April 2020!

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In Zineb Sedira’s ‘Mother Tongue’ the artist, her mother and her daughter try to exchange childhood memories in their native languages: French, Arabic and English. Sedira was born in Paris to Algerian parents, and moved to London to study art, where her daughter was born. The work reflects on storytelling as a way to preserve cultural identity across generations. It underscores the difficulty of maintaining a shared heritage across national and linguistic divides and acknowledges the complexity of identity. Watch it at Tate Britain in the Sixty Years Gallery

'Dora Carrington defied early 20th century conventions. Known as ‘Dumpty’ or ‘Carrington’ while attending The Slade School of Art in London, the latter name stuck for the rest of her career. She wore her hair short before it was in fashion, and in her life was in love with a man who loved men, was married to another man and loved several women. Carrington drew and painted unclothed life models when many considered this inappropriate for women to do. In photos, she appears neither feminine or masculine.'⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

'Typical historical accounts state that Carrington was in ‘turmoil of her sexuality’, displayed ‘a sense of intimidation by her own womanhood’ and had been ‘troubled by her sexuality’. We must also consider that none of these are true, and that she knew exactly who she was and what she wanted.' - Responses to works at Tate Britain by Tate's LGBTQ+ network. You can take a 'queer' walk through Tate Britain by using 'A Queer Walk Through British Art' on Tate's website.

Mood... 'BLUE PURPLE TILT' by Jenny Holzer consists of seven tall and narrow LED signs leaning against the gallery wall at an equal distance from one another. Slogans run through the signs. The LED signage of 'BLUE PURPLE TILT' makes reference to the technology used in modern public advertising and warning signs. In her reference to everyday experiences and emotions, Holzer’s witty and provocative slogans offer a critical reflection on modern society.

This is ‘Bird in Hand’ by Ellen Gallagher. The undersea landscape is related to Gallagher’s imaginative exploration of the Middle Passage, the most treacherous part of the slave trading route between Africa and North America. The central figure is a black sailor or pirate with a peg leg. ‘I think of this painting as an origin myth of sorts, with a kind of evil doctor, perhaps related to Doctor Moreau or Frankenstein, at its centre’, Gallagher has said.

This is one of eight photographs from Carey Young’s Body Techniques series, made in 2007. In each photograph the artist wears a smart two-piece suit and is pictured alone in the centre of the image within a landscape featuring recently completed or half-finished construction projects in the cities of Dubai and Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. The actions that Young is seen performing make reference to artworks from the 1960s and 1970s that explored the relationship between the artist’s body and its surroundings.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s ‘Predecessors’ uses old family photos to create shadows, walls and skirting. It’s an interesting way of using photo collage in art to explore family.

This is one of Jenny Holzer’s ‘Inflammatory Essays’. The tone of the ‘Inflammatory Essays’ is aggressive and challenging. The texts are the invention of the artist, although they do not necessarily reflect the artist's own views. From one Essay to another they ‘display a spectrum of views, from far-left to far-right. Read them all at Tate Modern, where they are displayed on Blavatnik Level 4 Concourse.

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