Maud Sulter was a trailblazing artist, photographer, poet and curator of Scottish and Ghanaian heritage, who continually championed Black women in the arts, speaking up for others who were not afforded a voice. Now, her work comes to Glasgow’s Tramway as they explore her family archive and bring to light many previously unseen works. Co-curator, Claire Jackson, speaks to SNACK about the significance of Maud’s own voice in this show, and the importance of exhibiting the work so close to where she was born.
Maud Sulter had such a rich and influential life – how does this exhibition connect this to the present day?
We really wanted to reflect Maud’s legacy as something that’s really active and exists in many ways as a living archive. There’s been a huge resurgence and renewed interest in Maud’s practice, and we wanted to create a space for a lot of that thought to coalesce. Maud devoted her practice to creating space for black women artists. She created an inheritance for artists working today, and it’s interesting to look at the ways in which her practice speaks through time. She looked to the past in terms of figures who have been erased from art history, but she also laid a foundation for the future.
Pelumi Odubanjo, my co-curator, is curating a live program that will manifest as a really dynamic program of events, commissions, readings, and poetry. In a way, it’s an exhibition in two parts – one part is Maud’s work, and the other responds to themes in her work such as community and family, and Glasgow as a city.
How has Glasgow changed since Maud Sulter was working and living here?
Maud Sulter was very much ahead of her time. She was truly pioneering, so a lot of the conversations she was having in the 80s and 90s are really a precursor to a lot of conversations that are happening now, around decolonising and rethinking dominant art narratives. She was really interrogating these themes way ahead of current institutions and was carving out space at a time when these conversations weren’t really happening in wider discourse.
That firmly locates her work in the now. There are also ways that archives can shift with advances in technology, so there are works that haven’t been able to be shown previously because they hadn’t been digitised, which is really exciting. That includes the entire back catalogue of films. We’re also able to use digitised sound installation to show soundscapes and spoken word soundtracks for the first time. That’s a consequence of the work being shown in 2024.
What’s the significance of highlighting Maud’s own voice?
Maud was born in the Gorbals, not very far from Tramway. She was born into a working class family in Glasgow, and described herself as Glaswegian Ghanaian – much of the exhibition explores this heritage. She really relished the Scots vernacular, and used the old Scots language to explore themes of family, plural identity, multiplicity, and shared histories. She often used Scots to describe the lives of Black women in Scotland and to delve into the complexities of belonging and their layered experiences. She was an incredible and prolific poet as well as a visual artist and curator and producer – that’s a really vital aspect of her work. A lot of Maud’s work manifests across multiple forms of media and for most of the works in the exhibition, there’s an accompanying text or poem. One of her poems, Alba, will be shown as an immersive multi-channel sound installation, so you’ll hear Maud’s voice resonating throughout the gallery. It’s both an embodied and an audible experience of poetry.
What sorts of ideas can be conveyed through this theme of voice?
Maud is often giving voice to others through her work. She talks about women’s lives that have been unrecorded and often imagined herself in different guises to reinscribe the legacies of black women who were erased or obscured in art history. In the film Plantation, Maud conjures the voice of Bertha Mason(?) from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. She was presented as the madwoman in the attic, and Maud really challenged that representation and the sense that her lived experience has been erased.
What was the most challenging aspect of presenting her work?
I think one of the most challenging things is our space, actually, as we are one of the largest galleries in Europe. We’re a former tram station. Managing to bring Maud’s archive into a conversation with that scale was quite challenging. We didn’t want to use these more formal modes of museum presentation, as we’re not a museum and Maud’s own practice was quite oppositional to those forms of display.
Maud’s mother Elsie was Glasgow’s last tram conductor – so she would have spent a lot of time in this space. It’s a really beautiful moment where the kind of archival and familial genealogies that Maud’s exploring intersect.
Featured Image: Syrcas. Duval et Dumas Duval, 1993 courtesy of the Estate of Maud Sulter and DACS
