Years ago, I saw a work by the British-Jamaican artist Donald Rodney that I have never forgotten. It was a house of dark shadows on a wall, configured out of hospital X-rays. In front of it sat a faceless figure, not much more than tattered clothes held up by a broken tree that rose like a spine – or a lynching – out of its frayed shirt collar.
Scissors, words and hands appeared in pale silhouette against the X-rays, intimating the past like a silent movie. Rodney referred to his Black family tree, his ancestral home. The House That Jack Built was made, quite literally, from medical evidence of the disease that would eventually kill him, as it had been fatal to the 75 million Black souls remembered here: Caribbean victims of sickle cell anaemia.
Rodney (1961-98) died so young and yet left so much. The House… is not even his most celebrated work. Spike Island have named their vital and unmissable survey after his 1990 installation Visceral Canker. This exoskeletal pumping system carries the fatal blood, with its mutant red sickle cells, round and round a diagrammatic hospital of switches, plugs and wires, past a pair of those gold-leafed wooden boards that carry the names of institutional benefactors. One coat of arms belongs to the queen, the other to the enslaver Sir John Hawkins, patron of the Hawkins hospital in Kent. It is shattering to see the roped, enslaved person that became his crest.
This is not just illness as metaphor, however, or what another artist might call the body politic. Rodney is not speaking directly to (or about) the state, like his South African near-contemporary William Kentridge, although both artists worked with acerbic black paper cutouts. Rodney’s stream of silhouettes for Soweto/Guernica (1988) is a brilliant concatenation of protesters, policemen and burning houses unfolding in a long sequence that might be Johannesburg or Brixton. And British racism, moreover, is always pressing through; witness a lightbox installation of the Black football player John Barnes back-kicking a banana lobbed at him on the pitch.
Rodney’s art is something else: more personal, internal and poetic. It is there in what looks like a sample of microscopic black cells from one of his sketchbooks, so often made in hospital, which turns out to resemble the notorious Brooks enslaver ship plan of 1781. And it is there in Flesh of My Flesh, a triptych of monochrome images that show what look like three long and twisting braids.
The central image is a closeup of one of Rodney’s hip scars, stitched and then overstitched by a surgeon who believed Black skin needed many more sutures. On either side are two silken hairs, also stretching like threads; one belongs to Rodney, the other to the white artist Rose Finn-Kelcey. They are identical.
An empty wheelchair moves gently around the galleries, almost approaching you, talking with you, then fading away: a lonely presence. Rodney speaks of the isolation of his illness most poignantly in a film tribute made for, and about, him by his colleagues in the BLK Art Group. As his hospitalisations grew more frequent, and he could make less, he began to work on a digital text-based “chat” system. You can still talk to him, or at least ask questions, sitting at a computer desk in front of his Autoicon.
There are many other works at Spike Island – sculptures, automata, slideshows, paintings. Some are from public collections, others have been specially recreated by the curators who have had the vision to mount this exceptional show. But the most powerful work of all is by far the smallest, condensed as a sonnet: a tiny house, paper-thin and fragile, sitting on an inch or two of shelf inside the wilderness of a vast glazed frame. It could be blown down in a single breath, this home; all that holds it together are a couple of household pins.
My Mother My Father My Sister My Brother comes from the last years of Rodney’s life. It carries connotations of all his forebears, but also of mortality itself. For this vulnerable home is made of something equally ephemeral: a little wafer of the artist’s own skin.
Had Rodney lived – and there is still no certain cure for sickle cell anaemia – he would be in his 60s and undoubtedly a recipient of the Tate Britain commission long ago. This year, it goes to another artist of Caribbean heritage instead, 41-year-old Alvaro Barrington, honouring the people of his past through the echoing grandeur of the Duveen Galleries. Barrington’s Grenadian grandmother is first, lovingly commemorated with congregations of rattan sofas, meticulously protected with blanket-stitched plastic, upon which you sprawl to the sound of warm rain drumming on the corrugated steel roof above. Wooden walls hold windows, in turn shrines to local weavings, remembered from his childhood.
Out of the rainstorm, you are in a carnival streetscape where a four-metre-high dancer, cast in shiny aluminium, rises like Venus from a ring of steel drums that send up their music at your touch. Barrington paints lifesize revellers on raw hessian – coarse, joyous, gyrating – strung from parade scaffolding. Costumes, music and jewellery are all courtesy of friends and fellow artists.
But we have been here before, far better done by Hew Locke, and in this very place. What strikes instead is the powerful shift of tone in the final space. The light turns solemn and eerie, the scaffolding transforms into police barriers, the island home is now a boarded-up kiosk, its steel shutters rising and falling to reveal the sinister cell within. Inspired by Barrington’s adolescence in New York, protected by his mother, Emelda, the atmosphere rises to a pitch among rows of prayerful – and plastic-clad – pews.
Wandering, listening, feeling, perhaps more than looking: that is the invitation of Barrington’s three-act drama. But the climax is entirely visual. A magnificent stained-glass window, high above, reprises the humble weavings of his youth as a radiant, all-together-now chorus of colour and love.
Star ratings (out of five)
Donald Rodney ★★★★
Alvaro Barrington ★★★
Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker is at Spike Island, Bristol, until 8 September, then tours to Nottingham Contemporary (28 Sept-5 Jan 2025) and the Whitechapel Gallery, London (12 Feb-18 May 2025)
Alvaro Barrington: Grace is at Tate Britain, London, until 26 January 2025
