NYASH STUDY

This work combines performance, video documentation and painting. The body becomes both instrument and surface. Rather than painting a body, the body produces the painting.

Clay and red pigment are applied directly onto the skin and transferred onto canvas through movement. The canvas becomes an active surface that receives pressure, residue and repetition. Clay evokes earth, ancestry and origin, while red pigment carries associations of blood, labour, violence, birth and survival. The materials are not illustrative but operative, marking the body as both site and medium of transformation.

The repeated act of twerking produces marks through duration, exhaustion and repetition. The painting becomes an accumulation of gestures rather than a resolved image. Meaning emerges through persistence, return and strain, refusing the idea that the image must stabilise or arrive at completion.

This speaks to the relationship between the Black female body and labour, particularly the ways physical, reproductive and cultural labour have been extracted while remaining invisible or aestheticised. Here, labour remains visible as residue. The process of making is not concealed but embedded in the surface of the work.

The video extends this process. It is not simply documentation of the performance but a second surface of production, holding duration, physical strain and movement in ways the painting cannot. Performance becomes a form of printmaking: the body presses itself into the surface repeatedly until movement becomes image and image becomes trace.

Drawing on Black feminist and experimental moving image practices, the video resists fixed narratives, linear resolution and stable ways of looking. The camera is not external to the body but entangled with it, moving with, alongside and sometimes against it. It becomes partial, embodied and unstable.

Across the work, painting and video operate as surfaces of contact. Time is held through repetition, pressure and residue rather than narrative. The video becomes both archive and rupture, holding the body while refusing to fully contain it.