HERE BY DRAGONS

“HERE BY DRAGONS”
is an exhibition delving into the mythologies that have emerged to fill the void within the Black European diaspora. Drawing from accumulated mythologies, misconceptions, and folkloric traditions, each artwork contemplates the contemporary confluence of 'Black' identities with their encounters amidst 'British' ones. Central to the exhibition lies a discourse between dark graphite marks on white paper, wherein shapes serve as a conduit to ephemerally depict humanity, gender, and animality, animating the myths which have been described in this identity's past.

By eschewing conventional representations of reality, the artworks deliberately embrace mythologies, prompting viewers to reconsider established notions of entrenched Western paradigms of representation, offering a space were symbolism reigns supreme. Embedded within the sinuous lines and contours of each piece, a myriad of interpretative layers unfolds, fluidly oscillating between conceptual territories, human embodiments, and enigmatic forms. Up close, the artworks pulsate with an inherent vitality, their organic forms suggesting a living consciousness captured on canvas. Yet, stepping back, they reveal a cartographic-like quality, their schematic nature inviting viewers to explore narratives that transcend individual bodies and extend into the expansive realm of imagination and collective memory. From the corporeal to the geographical, from bodies to lands, the narratives contained within the middle ground of these works unfold the liminal spaces between myth and identity, inviting new territories of mythologies.

Myths of Land
“Here by dragons” was a term used by European cartographers to fill in the voids of unexplored territories with illustrations of dragons and other mythological creatures. Wherever there was the unknown, myths emerged to explain it. When the ‘void’ became what is now known as Africa, the geographical information was considered both unknown and evolving. And, prior to the 17th century, this unknown was populated by myths, in the forms of imaginative illustrations of animals (Dürer's Rhinoceros), tales to deny authorship of bronze craftsmanship, or to define a culture as ‘barbaric’. Myths have a power to fill a void, and to fill it with a alternative narrative. Not until the 17th century were European maps of Africa stripped of centuries of accumulated myth, misconception, and unsustainable guesswork, taking the mapping of Africa back to its ‘bare bones’ of substantiated fact, leaving the interior as ablank canvas, entitled the ‘Dark Continent’, a challenge to a new generation of explorers[1]. [read: colonisers] Yet, this blank canvas became the basis for a divisive mythology - terra nullius, the land belongs to no one – and myths evolved from its lands to its identities.

Myths of Identities
Today, these geographic voids no longer exist, but the notion of dragons persists as a metaphor for the mythologies that are used to fill in the voids of identities. In the January 1985 issue of Playboy, an essay originally titled “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood” by James Baldwin shifted the meaning from where the dragons are to whom they represent. This exhibition isn't about mythical creatures, but about us as dragons, embodiments of mythologies, born from both violence and dreams, lies and truths, dilemmas and realities. For the ‘Black’ diaspora, the dragons dwell at the meeting point of two seas—between the coastlines of Britain and Africa. Here, a mythology shapes diasporic identities, navigating an idea of ‘home’ between paternal migrant narratives of a ‘homeland’ and stories of the lands we inhabit that feel as foreign. We are the dragons, part myth, part reality, existing before us and created by a* humanity itself. We shouldn't shy away from this void; it's where we breathe fire, transcend borders and ideals, and discover a language that can be transformative.’.

[1] Aaron Arrowsmith (1750 - 1823) a English cartographer. Created the ‘Africa To The Committee and Members of the British Association, 1802 republished in 1811 prior to the era of ‘New Imperialism’