Claudette Johnson

Marta Gnyp: Let’s start with the unavoidable question in this period. How did you spend the corona lockdown time?

Claudette Johnson: Well, initially I had to self-isolate, but for the last five or six weeks I have been able to come to the studio quite a lot. My studio is within walking distance of my house; it’s very quiet here, so I have been able to just carry on, though not quite as normal, in recent weeks. Perhaps it’s made me turn in on myself even more than usual as I haven’t been able to have models. Instead I have extended the small warm-up self-studies that I normally do, into a series of larger drawings.

MG: You probably work alone.

CJ: Yes. I have a self-contained studio within a larger studio that I share with one other.

MG: The lockdown in UK softened only recently. I think on the continent we were a few weeks earlier than you.

CJ: That’s right. Pubs and restaurants will be opening tomorrow but that won’t change my current routine.

MG: What about the other big issue that we have been facing the last weeks, the protests related to Black Lives Matter. How did you experience that?

CJ: I see the BLM as the necessary response to the entrenched racism that we are still struggling with in society. George Floyd’s death shocked me to my core. I am still reeling. I didn’t like the way that it was reported on television channels here. His final moments were shown repeatedly without any warning as if it were commonplace and as if it was not deeply distressing. As if it didn’t really matter. It illustrated perfectly why this movement is needed. To me it seems that many people are numbed to black people dying in all kinds of settings. The manner of his death has been rightly compared to a modern-day lynching.

MG: Do you think that there is a big difference between the US and Europe in this sense?

CJ: I haven’t ever lived in or even visited the States, so my views come from what I witness from a distance. Although black people have been part of British society since the 16th century, we have only become a significant minority relatively recently in the second half of the 20th century. British people on the whole were quite dislocated from their colonies and the brutality of slavery whereas African Americans were part of the American story from its inception. The racism that exists in both societies today stems from the stories that were told to justify slavery. In that way, I think the similarities between the experiences of Black Britons and African Americans, are greater than the differences. I was a teenager during the American Civil Rights protests but vividly remember the power of the slogans that crossed the Atlantic – Black is Beautiful, Black Power, Power to the People. I really believed things were going to change. However, there is still collective amnesia about Britain’s colonial past as evidenced by the failure to understand the anger that led to the pulling down of Edward Colston’s statue.

MG: We’re arriving at one of the core subjects of your work being identity and subjectivity of black people, especially black women. If I understand it correctly, the 1980s were the forming period that created the ideas and concept of your work.

CJ: Yes.

MG: During your studies at Wolverhampton University?

CJ: At the time it was polytechnic, but it became a university probably a year before I completed my degree.

MG: I read that you were the only black person in your class.

CJ: Yes, on the Fine Art course in each year group, there seemed to be just one black student per year.

MG: How was your study?

CJ: Looking back, I think I already knew that I wanted to focus on black people in my work early in my first year at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, but a number of influences from black friends to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, to Roots Rock Reggae music pushed me to formulate a black aesthetic that I felt was both feminist and rooted in black experience. Being one of so few black students studying fine art, I was a microcosm within a microcosm. The work I made created a mini society of black people that welcomed me to my studio each morning. At that time, there was no mention of the black artists that I now know had preceded me, so I believed I was working in a vacuum devoid of black British artists, or art that featured black people as primary subjects. We seemed to be on the edges of society, on the edges of history, footnotes to someone else’s story. When I started making large-scale works, I knew that the black figures had to be central and bold, but at times fractured, truncated to reflect our invisibility in British society; the absences in the stories that we had been told about ourselves. I countered the isolation by attending the student Afro-Caribbean Society meetings.

MG: What was the goal of the African-Caribbean Society?

CJ: The African-Caribbean Society was there to connect black students with each other. I remember meeting a number of South African students who gave me an insight into life under Apartheid. There were talks and socials. The polytechnic was divided into six floors. Fine Art was on the top floor and the other art departments below. There were more black students in other departments, especially in Graphic Design and Textile Design. The Society introduced me to a much broader range of black students than I would have met otherwise.

MG: You are British. It is interesting to see that you explored different routes to seek your own identity.

CJ: At that time there was no easy compatability between being black and being British. A black person was always assumed to be from somewhere else. I can’t count the number of times I was asked where I was from and met with disbelief when I said Manchester! The idea of Britain of multi-racial Britain did not yet exist. I was part of the first generation of black people born in Britain after the migration of West Indians who were invited here to work in Britain’s core industries, so, to some extent our generation had to invent ourselves. However, a black British identity came more easily than an English one. English was what our parents called native white people. It wasn’t what we called ourselves.

MG: Later on, in 1982 you joined the Young Black Artists organization.

CJ: What became the Black Arts Group was originally Wolverhampton Young Black Artists. Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper were from Wolverhampton, Marlene Smith was from Birmingham and I came from Manchester. We were all studying art at different universities in the Midlands but we would hold meetings in Wolverhampton.

MG: Your goal was to become more politically active in the territory of arts? Did you want to achieve something for black culture?

CJ: I thought that art could foster change. Black women seemed to be completely absent from Western art narratives and invisible in the media except when presented in stereotypical ways. I wanted to interrupt that. I wanted us to be seen. Visible as women with agency and power, as I knew the women in my life to be.

MG: You left the movement very quickly only one year after, in 1983.

CJ: It had been a very intense period and shortly after the Black Artists Convention we found we had irreconcilable differences. Nevertheless, I continued to show with various members of the group for some years afterwards and although it might look as if there was huge conflict in fact, my overriding memory is of the support and encouragement that we gave to each other. After the convention there really seemed to be a growing network of young black artists reaching out to each other from all parts of the country.

MG: It seems a very complex and complicated subject because there are so many different intersectional ideas representing various interests and groups in it. You were always interested in the position of women.

CJ: Yes.

Read the full interview in the book.