joseph scissorhands: Deborah Roberts: I have something to tell you

Friday, 15 July 2022

Deborah Roberts: I have something to tell you

Deborah Roberts - The Body Remembers (detail)

As a practitioner of collage I was eager to catch this show by Deborah Roberts in order to see first-hand how she constructs her images. I was surprised at the large scale of the works here which were a combination of collage, drawing and paint. Roberts is known for her subject matter featuring images of black children who have been sexualised or criminalised by society. The majority of these new pictures feature the figures of black children on black backgrounds which serves to highlight their lack of visibility in this wider society. There is a minimalism at play here. A range of black tones both matt and gloss, and then the only other details are the branded footwear of trainers, and the sometime decorative patterns of clothing coveted by these youths. The faces of these children are collaged/composed from more than one source/viewpoint whilst their bodies are reduced to drawn outlines reminiscent of the chalk outlines drawn around bodies at crime scenes. The stand-out piece for me in this show is also the most colourful but deals with the recently exposed subject-matter of the abuse of the rights of children in schools, the very place where they are supposed to be protected. These abuses have been carried out by the police, headteachers and teachers, as children in school suspected of possessing drugs are illegally strip-searched with no parent or legal representative present to witness the proceedings, leaving the child traumatised. The shocking outrages of the case of Child Q strip-searched whilst on her period and others have recently been made public, and Roberts has chosen to depict the incident of Child Q at this exhibition in her picture - The body remembers. The story of this incident so enraged Roberts that she chose to depict it in her art. “That experience will change her life. We try so hard to fight for our beauty. To take a child and to strip her of dignity and humanity. It touched me because generational trauma is passed on in black people. That trauma is in her now. That’s why the piece is called The Body Remembers. It’s the worse thing that could possibly happen to you besides rape,” she says. “To me, based on our history of enslavement, it was a way to break her, the way enslaved people were broken by overseers. That’s why I put multiple anonymous faces on the work, because the trauma she experienced is not new.” In this image Roberts depicts a child forced to touch her toes in preparation for an invasive search, but thankfully spares the child depicted the indignity of having to strip fully naked. The girl's trousers are red because Child Q was on her period when the search occurred. The addition of the cherries on the childs top refers to the assault/exploitation of her innocence during the procedure. Roberts references Picasso in some of these collages, but connections could also be made to other masters of the collage medium in these works such as Romare Bearden, John Heartfield and Hannah Höch.