I am Siobhan An Jie Russell Wood, a photographer, sculptor, plus sized model, ex-fashion assistant, video maker, and poet. My multi-disciplinary studio practice is informed by these experiences. I work in a highly mediated collaged process that mimics the way information is thrown at us and only some of it sticks.
I reckon with my daily insertion into foreign social and racial contexts. My bloodline is a product of displacement because of British and Dutch Colonial rule in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and New Zealand. I am related to the enslaved, slave owners, and enslavers. I look to my own imperialist trade histories to examine the commodified ‘Other’ and representations of diaspora ‘kulture’ within western society and media.
My work is a material rendering of cultural abstraction, the scar tissue of diaspora. An ongoing study and re-appropriation of the process of ‘cultural abstraction’ that I believe my own mixed ethnicity/class body has been through. My ideas around diaspora, identity, media commodified ‘otherness’, and assimilation are touched on but my main aim is to unpack the whole notion of the ‘creation of identity’ itself within late capitalism.
Text and language is important because my heritage has only been understood orally through stories. Due to the inherently complicated nature of displaced peoples’ histories, I want to reclaim that past, freeing it from systems of suppression. ‘We say things when the doors are closed. Things so true they’re only spoken, not written.’ An intentional interruption to centralized narratives of power that silence ‘Othered’ voices – family lore, spoken-spell-whispered-witchcraft- is at the core of this project, braiding image and language together. The parts are still discernible, but together they become something ‘other.’ Like me: visible and invisible, foreign and native. It is a deliberate decomposition of generational paranoia, truths untold, and internalised lies from the white guy. The materiality of my work centres on this mysticism as I channel my ancestors. ‘For, we want happiness, and faces of joy to devour this prolonged generational scream. of the broken, the trodden, the downright unseen.’
