AN ART installation exploring how people are connected through land and water is set to be revealed at a festival celebrating refugees this month.
Artist Grace Browne is set to unveil her latest installation All Water Is Connected in Glasgow on June 12 as part of this year’s opening ceremony of this year's Scottish Refugee Council’s (SRC) Refugee Festival Scotland.
Installed across The Hidden Gardens in Glasgow, the temporary public artwork explores ancestral and contemporary migration with the theme of belonging through water, earth, and shared history.
Browne, a Nigerian-British artist based in Glasgow, said her art is rooted in uli and inale, the ancient body and mural arts practiced by her Igbo and Idoma foremothers.
“My great-grandmothers were the last people to practice them,” Browne told the Sunday National.
“In my art practice, I just kind of explore ways of reconnecting with the arts and like trying to understand them.
“Their art forms were passed on intergenerationally, and there's been kind of a disruption in my family, due to things like colonialism and the impacts of Christianity.
“So my exploration is how do I reconnect with the arts.”
Browne’s installations weave water, earth, and bronze, inviting visitors to become part of a living cartography.
Her All Water Is Connected explores the fluid relationship with people and land and how new lands welcome people and how their homelands remember them.
Earth holds memory in its layers, Browne explains, adding that water carries stories that shape and reform them.
Browne shares a deep relationship with nature as she says uli and inale are said to be a gift from the earth goddess.
She uses natural materials from across Scotland to help create her art, and she uses earth to make pigments for her work.
“I also like seeing similar symbols that you notice in the land here in Scotland.
“One of the symbols is a spiral, which symbolises the earth, and you just see that everywhere.
“Like it's made of shells, on rocks, the way grass grows, everything has that spiral. It has been quite interesting, seeing these correlations.”
Along with the installations, there will be live music, food, and also a workshop run by Browne on how to make pigments made from earth.
Browne said that her art has helped tell stories about people’s histories that are even hidden or have been forgotten.
“With this project, I was quite interested in how people have always travelled around the world.
“Like now travel is such a contested topic, like people migrating and moving is such a contested thing, but people have always moved.
“For example, I was quite interested in going to Iona because that was once like a centre where people would travel by water, like primarily it was a big hub, people would come there for pilgrimage, they'll come for refuge and because of things like the nunnery and the monastery there as well.
“But also there's that history of people moving around, which I think is quite interesting, and I think art creates that space where we can tell our stories and tell those stories, and connect to each other on a kind of human heart-to-heart level, which I think is important.”
Browne added that she drew a lot of inspiration from the Isle of Iona, as it has some of the oldest geology in Europe and has a rich history.
She added that All Water Is Connected stemmed from the understanding of her foremothers' art form that people are all connected in some way and that because the human body is around 60% water, the element plays an important role in connecting us all.
“We're not as separate as we might imagine.
“We're actually way more connected and there's so much overlap.
“Like I was saying, the same symbol you see in uli, the spiral you see everywhere in nature here, you also see it in like Celtic art as well, so it's these things that we've always seen and we’ve always understood.”
Browne said the Refugee Festival Scotland, which runs across the country from June 12 to 21, with more than 150 events taking place, is a great celebration of communities coming together.
“It’s really important to celebrate our connections with each other and also celebrate the things that immigrants bring to the country,” Browne said.
She added: “It's important that we also have that space where we can tell our own stories as well, and it's a care-centred space, it's an open festival, so people can contribute to it as well.”
Grace Browne: All Water Is Connected runs June 12-21. Open Tues-Fri 10am-5pm and Sat-Sun 11am-5pm. Admission is free. Click here to learn more.
