TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
White Cube Bermondsey is pleased to present A MERCY | DUMMY, an exhibition of sculpture, installation and painting by Tiona Nekkia McClodden.
February 14 – March 24, 2024
Borrowing its title from a 2008 novel by Toni Morrison, A MERCY is comprised of a series of hand-painted steel head gates – utilitarian devices used to restrain and direct livestock in preparation for inoculation or slaughter. Contemplating their dual capacity to soothe and facilitate brutality, McClodden draws parallels with Morrison’s novel, set in late 17th-century colonial America. In the narrative, a mother employs a brutal act of mercy, seeking to protect her daughter from the same violence that she herself endured. The head gates metaphorically embody the paradoxical nature of finding mercy within finite frameworks of violence.
The artist’s use of headgates as a medium originated from research conducted in preparation for her 2019 New York solo exhibition, ‘Hold on, let me take the safety off’, where McClodden installed a fully functional painted cattle chute in the centre of the gallery. The research behind the exhibition occurred alongside her process of receiving a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when she arrived to this body of work in relation to Temple Grandin, an animal behaviourist and autism activist renowned for pioneering more humane practices for guiding and restraining livestock.
Centred on McClodden’s extensive study of the ‘suspension of disbelief’ – a term first coined by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to describe the willing concession of critical logic to accept implausible fictive scenarios – the second body of work, DUMMY, presents an immersive installation in the form of a one-act play that sits as an ‘arrested scene’, featuring a leather dummy voiced by actress Sophie Okonedo, as the core protagonist.
In the 9x9x9 gallery, three leather dummies perform the same monologue, utilising three different states of being: Melancholic Restraint, Wounded Rage and Defiant Pride. McClodden’s dummies – vintage leather models made between 1930–50 that the artist repaired, hand-dyed and shined – engage in a dialogue with a series of leather hide paintings. These paintings draw on the silhouette of the masks originally featured in the Paris (1959) and New York (1961) presentations of Genet’s play. In the creation of the paintings, the artist utilised white greasepaint in the colour of ‘CLOWN WHITE’, the same paint applied in theatre to project the whiteness of an actor’s skin on a stage.
The greasepaint on the leather exhibits the same bright retention, enhanced by the addition of baby powder, resulting in a clay-like texture that corresponds with the photographic image. Incorporating subtle alterations, McClodden creates a modification of the original masks to reaffirm their historical reference to African masks.
Through the suspended, speculative frameworks of A MERCY and DUMMY, McClodden interrogates the critical activation point bridging the conditions of witnessing and intuiting, mercy and subjugation, enlisting metaphorical devices to explore the endurances of being human.