What a good Turner prize shortlist this is. With artists engaging in photography, sculpture, moving image, installation, performance, sound and the spoken word, what immediately strikes me, as well as their variety, are the thematic crossovers between them. One can speak about the legacies of colonialism and migration that recur in the life histories and the art of both Ingrid Pollard and Veronica Ryan, who both came to the UK from the Caribbean as children in the 1950s, and of the questioning of identity and place in both their works and that of non-binary artist Sin Wai Kin (brought up in Toronto with a Hong Kong Chinese father and an English mother).
The ongoing environmental crisis and our relationships to the natural world are, in different ways, persistent themes across the shortlist, as are questions of identity and belonging. Our relationship to both history and place (and the histories of places) crops up again and again. So, too, does a sense of a morphing between genres and categories. Pollard has discussed her own work as a kind of mashup, while Sin talks about “blowing up categories” in their drag performances, which involve a kind of slippage between performances of a kind of exaggerated, parodic femininity and the creation of a kind of mythological sculpting of the self.
For a long time Pollard’s work seemed to focus on Black experience and the British countryside, on nature, nurture and the construction of a sense of place, while Ryan’s sculpted fruit speak both of the variety of organic form and its use as a commodity (including its harvesting by child labour), played with in sculptural and metaphorical ways. Ryan’s Windrush art commission in Hackney in London presents an oversized custard apple, breadfruit and soursop, remade in bronze and marble, and she has used seeds as a metaphor for both propagation and for the spread of viruses and pandemics. The vulnerability of Pollard’s flotillas of paper boats, remade in ceramic, speak both of vulnerability and persistence.
Both Sin and Heather Phillipson can at times be very funny, both in your face and affecting and vulnerable. Do not mistake their humour and irony for a lack of seriousness. Born in 1991, Sin is the youngest here, while Phillipson (born in 1978) has had a great deal of recent exposure with both her 2020 fourth plinth sculpture in Trafalgar Square and her 2021 commission at Tate Britain.
Born in the 1950s, both Ryan and Pollard (Pollard working mostly with photography and printmaking, Ryan in sculpture) have suffered the vagaries of fashion and visibility during their careers, and both have continued to develop their art well into their 60s. A sense of growth, revival and reinvention are the greatest things all four artists share. It is a time when such aspirations are needed more than ever.
The Turner prize 2022 nominees’ work will be at Tate Liverpool, from 20 October to 19 March, with the winner announced in December 2022 at a ceremony in Liverpool.
