Kyra-Sky Foster is one of three Platform Graduate Award artists showing their work at Modern Art Oxford this year. Her exhibition Black Hole as Metaphor, currently on display in our Creative Space, features a barrel as part of the installation. In this post, Foster explores the barrel as physical object, and the barrel as metaphor.
Words by Kyra-Sky Foster
The barrel explores ideas of shipment and displacement, whilst simultaneously (visually) alluding to an astronomical black hole’s shadow – the kind we see in images and digital impressions.
The barrel in question belongs to myself and my family. It swam across oceans from home to home, carrying our most valuable possessions in its belly.
The journey from St.Lucia to England is significant in that it represents an aspect of the black experience, that is, migration. I was born here in England, as was my mother; but my grandmother came here as a young woman to start anew.
Although the barrel has great personal significance, it also represents a version of the black experience expressed on a macro scale. It’s literal function (to ship) reflects the movement of black bodies over and through water from the the moors, to the transatlantic slave trade, to the Windrush.
The molasses which lines the barrel’s interior works symbolically on a similar level to the barrel itself. Molasses is a product made up largely in part of sugar cane, something which I also have a rich familial connection to. My great grandpap would cut sugar cane, my grandmother would tell me stories of how she’d follow him and her brother through an undisturbed paradise, her St.Lucia. They’d traverse through forests and up mountains to watch him cut cane, she says the cane was so sweet – I always imagine it tasting like the misplaced nectar of an ancient spirit or god.
The molasses also references its history to labour and suffering, it moves like sweet blood, thick and dark.
Visit Kyra-Sky Foster: Black Hole as Metaphor until 16 October 2022. The Platform Graduate Award exhibition series runs until 30 October 2022.