It's an impossible situation and prayer certainly helps to alleviate the fear' and this religious undertone is felt throughout the artwork.
Blue Power and Ar’n’t I A Woman are two major installations brought to life within the brutal concrete walls of Block 336. Karen McLean’s practice interrogates postcolonial legacies evident in contemporary life, these two works particularly explore issues of drugs, mass incarceration and display the hidden histories of enslaved black women.
Karen McLean, 'BLUE POWER', 2021
In Blue Power the idea of being bathed in blue, baptised, cleansed of all your sins is felt as you move through space.
Upon entry the beaded handmade curtain gives the feeling of submerging yourself in the water during baptism, engulfing yourself under the waters’ surface. To Caribbean audience members this is a familiar motif, the beaded curtain that nearly all Caribbean mothers had back in the day. But here the curtain is made out of soap ‘referencing the spirituality, the death and the murders’ says Mclean.
Karen McLean, 'BLUE POWER', 2021, installation view.
The piece is richly layered, with the iconography of the crucifix, the colour, and everyday domestic objects used. ‘a lot of it is about memory and I’m using the materials of my childhood’. The crucifix symbolising Christianity and death evokes a visceral reaction. ' It's an impossible situation and prayer certainly helps to alleviate the fear' and this religious undertone is felt throughout the piece
“It’s an impossible situation and prayer certainly helps to alleviate the fear’ and this religious undertone is felt throughout the artwork”
The centre seems all blue but from the sides two yellow lights illuminate the crosses gently, evoking the heavenly call. “We spent a long time trying to get the lighting right, it was one of the things that took the longest.” This careful consideration can be felt in the installation. The colour elicits an idea of death and peace, the calm that becomes of being at rest. The going away and escape of the boats, bringing you to a better life. “When you live in societies like Trinidad, some people, especially those affected by the drug turf wars become desperate to leave and that's what the metaphoric boats are about.” Death is often something people shy away from, particularly in the west. In other nations this isn’t the case, especially in The Caribbean, elderly relatives openly speak about “when they go” like a place of ease that life is a waiting room for. The tranquillity captured through the use of space and colour captures this all at once.
Karen McLean, 'BLUE POWER', 2021, installation view. Image courtesy of Block 336
“We spent a long time trying to get the lighting right, it was one of the things that took the longest”
The weight of mass death is felt heavily and offers comfort at first but is more disconcerting as time goes on. Coupled with social distancing measures a new level of isolation is felt for these people and I related to it.
Sitting, looking at the installation, I was alone but somehow connected, though not physically to those around me. Like mourners attending a cemetery to visit different graves, like archipelagos, connected somehow. I wondered if this was something the artist had considered when making it, and she felt it added a new dimension. ‘It was so uncanny because all these people are dying in Brazil and they’re making these fields- these makeshift cemeteries, and the gravediggers are making these crosses and painting them in blue.
It’s like a sea of blue mirroring the exhibition out in the field.’ The so-called war we have all been facing for the last year also evoked memorials. ‘It’s drug turf wars, so I wanted it to look like a war memorial or cemetery… we’re losing a generation of men, to me there’s not enough conversation about it.
The huge standout in the room is the colour blue. ’I’m thinking of the Blues players and when you listen to the lyrics of Blues it really comes from the plantation, it has that history, The other thing is Picasso had a good friend and when he died, Picasso went through a period of just painting blue, and that had to do with death and his sadness. Since Elizabethan days, blue was the colour of servitude, it was worn by the servants and the working class, there are all those layers and parallels.’ So it is no wonder that the more you look, the more you feel, the more you uncover.
Blue soap is used to clean things, cleanse them and keep them white, this I thought was an interesting choice when commenting on the legacies of colonialism. As before slavery and colonisation, Caribbean countries did not practice Christianity as widely, but these countries kept this part of ‘whiteness’. For the artist this was all about the material, the soap “we had this blue soap and in the older days they used to use it for the collars of white clothes, and then when I used to help my mum to wash, we used Reckitts Crown Blue which is a little cube you put on the white clothes, so those are the things that were really playing on me.”
Karen McLean, 'BLUE POWER', 2021, installation view
Ar’n’t I A Woman elevates quilting, sewing and traditional women’s work, it reclaims the branding of enslaved peoples and uses it to make a statement in the gallery space. Its use of community backing is evident in the manifestation in the space, much like a patchwork blanket it hangs with very different sections all joined together like the women depicted. One can imagine sisterhood in the creation as well as the history of sisterhood needed to build a revolution. The strength of the women here as well as their anger is applauded, subverting traditional notions of the angry black woman that we all try not to be. These women are fierce and rightly so, without them we wouldn’t have the rights that we do now. “I was so intrigued about how the women quilted and the materials they used for quilting were their grandmothers, great grandmothers, maybe their own, their mothers, maybe they had a family member who died, those were the pieces of cloth they used to make the quilts. They made the quilts because that was what they had to sleep on and to escape the patriarchy and built their own identities. I was celebrating the enslaved women so that was important in the making of the work.
Karen McLean, 'Ar'n't I a Woman!', 2021, installation view
“The sacks were all handmade, everything was handmade and when you’re working with your hands, you have a human error which is really nice, because you can see the work of the hand so you know it’s not machine done and that was purposefully done”
With the first work to the right on entry, you get the idea of entrapment into slavery. The narrative structure of the exhibition allows you to walk in the shoes of these women. The chicken wire gives the idea of being trapped in something, the lighting means that when looking closer you also see the shadow of that entrapment. This got me thinking about mass incarceration the many people facing it due to the legacies of colonialism and the original entrapment of enslavement. Shadows give a sense of past and present, ‘they are referencing the legacies of colonialism. First the shadows of the sacks and wombs, then the crosses. ‘We have a big drug problem now, so we have a lot of drug turf wars happening, the sad thing is we’re losing a generation of men, so the work hopes to open up that conversation.’
Every element though similar had a level of difference, In Blue Power, each cake of soap was slightly different. Some more worn than others, lacking the fresh blueness, used, perhaps showing how the individuals themselves are used by life, then descend back into the earth. The wombs of Ar’n’t I a woman are all the same in shape but different upon inspection. On some, the ovary shells are sewn closer together, the branding markings leaving holes in different places. “The sacks were all handmade, everything was handmade and when you’re working with your hands, you have a human error which is really nice, because you can see the work of the hand so you know it’s not machine done and that was purposefully done”. This made the viewing experience an exceedingly enjoyable one because you always got something different wherever you looked.
Karen McLean, 'Ar'n't I a Woman!', 2021, installation view
Both works have this coupling of the west and the Caribbean resulting in the merging of traditions in postcolonial Caribbean life. The Devil really is in the detail, (and watching over at the very back of the room) the piece reveals itself slowly and gets even more interesting once unpicked. Block 336 couldn’t have been a more perfect place to really reveal the feeling, the history of the piece. ‘This exhibition space has been the best I have installed Blue Power in, it looks great!.".The artist remarks and I wholeheartedly agree.
'BLUE POWER // AR'N'T I A WOMAN!' at Block 336 now, up until the 12th of June, book here.
*Changes were made to the original published version of this article on June 22, 2021
