The Mythology of Blackness – Within These Walls – Home as Archive
| Project Title | The Mythology of Blackness – Within these Walls – Home as Archive |
| Location | Home/ London/ England |
| Date | December 2025 |
Artist Statement
I am a London-based visual artist whose practice explores representation, perception, and the politics of looking – through painting, installation, and domestic space. I am interested in how meaning is shaped through proximity, repetition, and lived experience, particularly within environments that are often dismissed as private or informal. The home functions not as a neutral backdrop, but as an active site where memory, labour, and presence accumulate over time.
I approach making as a process of layering rather than resolution. Works are shaped by duration, residue, and return, resisting fixed narratives or singular readings. The viewer plays a central role in this process. Meaning emerges through their movement, perspective, and embodied engagement with the space, rather than being delivered as a closed statement.
My work is informed by questions of visibility and authorship, particularly in relation to Black representation and the gaze, but it resists positioning itself solely as resistance. Instead, it proposes parallel ways of seeing and existing. By situating the work within domestic space, I seek to hold intimacy as a valid and critical site of knowledge production.
Context Statement
The first stage of a long term ethnographic and collaborative legacy project, investigating what Blackness looks like when it is not shaped by, or required to respond to, whiteness. The work asks who we are when code switching is no longer necessary and what remains when adaptation is no longer expected. By placing Western mythologies of Blackness alongside lived experience, the project explores conflicts/dualities of identity while affirming the right to self narration and unmediated existence. It asserts that Black people do not need to justify their presence. We are already whole. We are living, breathing archives of our own truth
Rather than revising misrepresentation within dominant systems, the project constructs a parallel space where Blackness is documented as it lives: unrehearsed and self-authored. Painting, installation, and unscripted domestic performance unfold over time, forming a living archive that remains active and unfinished. Conceived as an ongoing and cumulative practice rather than a finite artwork. It exists across time and resists closure, positioning Black self narration as a form of historical record. The project is concerned with continuity, care, and transmission rather than monument building or personal legacy. It carries ways of being, seeing, and making forward into the future, beyond the individual artist.
Engaging with ideas from physics, particularly relativistic simultaneity, to treat time as flexible rather than linear. Past, present, future, and ancestral time coexist within the space. Multiple truths unfold at once, embedded within the walls, objects, and rooms of the home, which itself becomes an archive of memory and meaning. Drawing conceptually on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, this project understands meaning as relational rather than fixed. Einstein proposed that reality is shaped by the position of the observer, and this work adopts a similar logic. The artwork is activated through the presence of the viewer, whose movement, perspective, and lived experience shape how it is perceived. There is no neutral viewpoint and no singular interpretation. Each encounter produces a different reality, positioning the viewer as an essential participant in the work’s meaning. There are no absolutes.
Biblical and mythological narratives, particularly figures such as Eve, Medusa, and Eris, are used as analytical tools to examine how symbolic storytelling has historically disciplined, romanticised, or controlled Black women. These mythic frameworks are held alongside lived domestic experience, allowing multiple temporalities, lived, ancestral, and mythic, to coexist without resolution. These myths reflect the ways Black womanhood has been shaped by a white and male gaze that mythologises and distorts lived reality. Rather than correcting or erasing these narratives, the project places them alongside another truth, revealing what has been overlooked or obscured. Blackness is not explained for an external audience. Whiteness remains present as a historical condition, but it no longer directs the narrative. It observes without control.
This project does not operate as resistance or explanation. Instead, it asks what forms of representation, authorship, and knowledge become possible when Black presence is understood as already complete. While elements of the project are documented and shared, the work prioritises first-hand encounter and proximity, recognising that aspects of domestic life and embodied experience resist full translation.
Using the home as a gallery is a deliberate methodological choice. It requires no external permission and establishes a space where I am encountered on my own terms. The domestic environment becomes a micro society where whiteness enters only as a guest, not as an authority. The project builds a parallel truth rooted in family, community, and self-determination. It speaks directly to Black audiences as an act of recognition, and invites others to witness without explanation or translation. This is not a protest. It is peace, and it is a right. The home is not a neutral space that resets each day. It holds traces of movement, use, and memory that accumulate over time. Each day builds upon the last, meaning the space is continually shaped by lived experience rather than returning to an original state. The work exists within this ongoing accumulation, embracing continuity and residue rather than a fixed beginning.
Project Documentation
Special thanks
I would like to thank Course Leader Josie Cockram for unwavering patience and support, and Rachael Burhouse, Student Advisor, for always being on hand in a crisis.
Thank you to Demetrius Williams for his collaborative contributions and support of the project’s vision.
I would also like to thank my supervisor, Kate Fahey, for being available when required and for giving me the trust and space to work independently.
I am deeply grateful to my two daughters, Alana and Ava-Naicole, for their continuous input into my creative practice, and to all who participated — both voyeuristically and immersively — in bringing this project to life.
Finally, thank you to Falmouth University for providing the space in which I have been able to expand my practice.
website link. https://www.georgina-elizabeth.com/
TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/@the_cats.meow
Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/muse_me_art
