Walking into Kedisha Coakley’s exhibition at Bloc Projects, I am transported into this story with music that feels unfamiliarly familiar and the sight of draped Mexican coffee bean bags. The bags remind me of a coffee bean’s journey, and of all the bean experiences before it meets hot water in my coffee cup. Coffee, a plant seed itself, is a taking. And I remember this is an exhibition about the effects of the colonial taking of land, nature and meaning.
As I walk through, I’m guided by poet Otis Mensah’s musings on nature, family, and the pain of the memories of a home that, though resilient, has been forcibly changed.
“The spine of my church”,
“petals from your mother
petals from the marketplace
petals from aunty”
He speaks of images
“in the eyes of our deceased homes”.
A beautiful, but difficult, message about the sentience of home and memory. Each line is a nod to what we can see around us. Each line reminding us of nature’s inextricable link to the home of our ancestors. As a Black British woman, it again feels unfamiliarly familiar.
Archival stories of spirituality and gender, sensuality and sexuality also glitter the experience, which you’ll find if you look closely enough. To the right of the room are some church window-shaped cuts in a blue window. These shapes also feel familiar to me, as someone who grew up in a church, appealing to my sense of memory, in what feels like an intended consequence of the experience. In the windowsill are handmade sculptures of plants, shells and nature’s creations. Looking at them, I can’t help but make a link between the artist’s hands and the art of making, between hands and plant growing or rearing. Coakley in each sculpture mirrors that closeness of hands to nature, of body to nature and body to colonial power.
