Rodney Grainger

In my dream I was young again and awoke to a field of sheets

My interest is mining the past through visual imagery so that I might recover possible bridges linking a precarious present with an uncertain future. I have chosen to rely on drawing with charcoal because it is closely aligned to writing; makes a strong graphic statement and black and white is the primary language of memory, dreams and the unconscious.
 
In my searching I have found, etched into my earliest life narratives, an unceasing self consciousness for those conditions upholding my white identity. These are nagging concerns for that collusive role my shared whiteness plays in sustaining human chasms of prejudice and inequality.  Given the place of my birth and rearing, Birmingham, Alabama, circa 1948, an epicenter of white idealization, white superiority, and for "ordained" white dominance, this particular childhood sense-of-self had for a long time seemed inexplicable.
   
As that Birmingham child, I awoke each morning into a haze of steel mill soot and racism.  I could glimpse the smoke stacks, hear the furnaces roar in the middle of the night, smell the dense industrial air and understand this to be progress and prosperity in the "New South".  That more acrid scent of racial disgust, fear and hatred that was vigilantly entwined to an obsessive white taboo against 'mixing', defied understanding.  This was a dogma not to be questioned.  This was "just how things were".

The histories of white and black relationships in this country are, I believe, a crucial metaphor for something pervasive and far reaching within the white psyche. These foundations of white identity - its dominant assertion for overriding privilege and power - while not the sole malefactor in the perpetuation of the world's miseries, make it a principal player.

I knew I would need to look beyond an intellectual understanding for my dis-ease over my identity.  There at the center of my early life existed an intimately potent counter presence to the otherwise all encompassing apartheid experience.  "She" was my African American nanny, my 'other' mother.
I would need to go back to beginnings, to that day in the sunlight, to the warmth, the brownness, scents of sweet copper, a breath so close with face large and smiling.  She held me to her strong softness with the sureness of hands that cradled, her laugh, a resonant music of voice and song. All are memories before I had words.
Little is written about this significant social arrangement, a chapter detailing one of the most personal and intimate connections between black and white populations for greater than half a century.  No comparable set of social circumstances had occurred before or since in this country.

The inclusion of the African American domestic worker within the inner sanctum of white middle class homes involved a complex arrangement of family relationships, albeit ones highly asymmetrical in their day to day negotiations. 'Her' dark skinned female presence signified an added social status for the white family.   With all of her physical body and self as sole arbiter, the domestic would intercede with all things 'deemed' to be of 'dirt'. This 'kinship' to dirt combined with her performative role as "one of the Good Negroes"- demonstrated through her invisibleness and unconditional deference to all things white - became coextensive with the white family's perceptions of a social and symbolic order.

"…awakened to a field of sheets…", two large narrative (8' x 8') charcoal drawings on birch plywood, portray recollections of private spaces where racial distinctions were often blurred but never fully erased.  Within is a convergence of social issues about gender, class relationships, racial difference, and social oppression. These images also aim to challenge the enduring myth of an American icon, "Mammy" or "Aunt Jemima", a.k.a. "the happy negro", stereotypes that linger within the cultural psyche and continue to promote unrealistic notions about harmonious relations across class, race and gender. 

In my dream I was young again and awoke to a field of sheets (left side)
2006
site specific installation
charcoal on wood
8' x 16'

In my dream I was young again and awoke to a field of sheets (right side)