Shervone Neckles

WEBVTT

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Hi, I'm

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Siobhan Neckles.

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I'm one of the founding members of the
Southeast Queens Artist Alliance and I'm thrilled to be participating

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in our newest exhibition that is being
presented at York College.

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It's the Emerging from Isolation: Notes on the
Pandemic exhibition.

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In this exhibition I'll be presenting four
pieces from my Provenance series,

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which is a print and textile series that I
started in 2017 and it's an ongoing

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project that I am doing to this present day.
In this series I am constructing

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an origin story. I'm positioning my ancestral
home which was built in

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the mid-19th century in Grenada, West Indies
at the head of this naked

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female figure that's rendered in silhouette
and that figure is actually my figure in my 20s.

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And the home has survived a number of natural
disasters, which I think speaks a lot to

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this lineage of preservation that is a through
line in my work.

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The print series is also a poly ester plate
series and so it's a unique one-of-a-kind

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prints. So each print is embellished in the
surface of the print

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is embellished in various ways with collage,
embroidery, beadwork.

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I'm really just bringing in as many different
materials as possible and manipulating the surface in various

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ways. And that this to me speaks to this kind
of personal examination into notions of selfhood that

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I'm trying to explore in this series. So I
tend to do a lot of reading and I reference

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a lot of quotes and return to them throughout
when I'm working on a project.

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And one of the quotes that I was constantly
returning to when I was working on the Provenance series

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is from Beloved, Toni Morrison's novel
Beloved, where she states,

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"Freeing yourself is one thing, claiming
ownership of that freed self is another."

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And so in the Provenance series, I'm really
doing this kind of hyper focus

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on the interiority and intersub jectivity and
I'm using that as a form of gaining personal agency

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for myself. I'm seeing this as a kind of
personal pursuit towards this kind of liberation and

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it's really a kind of like a kind of conscious
undoing

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and remaking of personhood that I'm exploring
here. And so in the Provenance series,

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there is about over 30 pieces in the series.
I'm only featuring four in the exhibition,

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but each of the prints, they're unique because
I have embellished them in various ways.

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And I'm really trying to explore this claiming
of that freed self that Toni Morrison talks about

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in that quote. And it's really about this
bridging of the material and the spiritual

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or the the sacred and the sciences.

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And so in the series, I'm really exploring
questions like how do I free my black female

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body from the vestiges of servitude, from the
trauma and from exploitation?

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And how do I then

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reclaim my land? How do I reclaim my body? How
do I reclaim myself? How do I reclaim my home?

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And so in the series, you'll see I'm using
this embroidery and I'm using

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these threaded gold lines, repetitious
threaded gold lines and beading.

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And it's my way of trying to mimic these
energy fields, mimic electron density maps,

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mimic contour maps. And I'm even mimicking the
patterns in nature,

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like so the zelium patterning of how

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plants nurture themselves. So I'm mimicking
all of these things. And it's my way of trying to synthesize

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this physical and sensorial transmissions of
energy. I'm trying to express our

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oneness and our wholeness and our
interconnectedness and show these signs of like that.

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So that's from nature, right? And from
sciences. So the giving,

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the give and take and the push and the pull
and even universal principles

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such as the African, the South African
philosophy of Ubuntu.

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I am because you are, you are because I am. So
I'm exploring all of these things and I,

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and you can see that also featured in a lot of
the works in the exhibition along amongst my colleagues

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in the show. So I do hope you enjoy and thank
you for allowing me to share about my work.