Sonia Boyce: Art, Collaboration and the Right to Be Heard

In Sonia Boyce’s Feeling Her Way, voices travel between rooms. The installation brings together film of five musicians, patterned wallpaper, reflective golden structures and recordings from a growing collection of Black women’s music. Presented in the British Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, it turns the gallery into a place for listening to individual voices and hearing what happens when they meet. Its material includes the exploratory exchanges that usually precede a finished performance. ¹

From East London to the Black Arts Movement

Boyce was born in Islington in 1962 and attended Eastlea Comprehensive School in Canning Town. Her art education began with a foundation course at East Ham College of Art and Technology in 1979–80, followed by a fine art degree at Stourbridge College in the West Midlands between 1980 and 1983. ²

At the first national conference of Black artists, held in Wolverhampton in 1982, she met the artist and curator Lubaina Himid. ³

Her early exhibition record places her within that activity. In 1983 she participated in Five Black Women at the Africa Centre and Black Woman Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre. Two years later, her work appeared in The Thin Black Line at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. By 1986 she had solo exhibitions at the Black-Art Gallery and Air Gallery in London. This was a career developing through collective initiatives as well as individual work, with Black women creating opportunities to exhibit and discuss their art. ²

Drawing herself into the picture

The figure was central to Boyce’s early work. Pastel drawings and photographic collage allowed her to explore how race, gender and everyday experience shaped a person’s sense of herself. Her pictures could be intimate and confrontational at the same time: domestic patterns, gestures and clothing carried questions about authority, family and belonging. The force of the work depended on the decisions made within the image, including its scale, colour and arrangement of bodies. ³

She Ain’t Holding Them Up, She’s Holding On (Some English Rose), made in 1986, presents a powerful self-image. A woman with blue hair wears a pink dress patterned with black roses. Her raised arms reach towards a family group above her: two seated adults and two children. An intricate pattern runs behind the figures. The title leaves a question open: is she supporting the people above, or maintaining her own hold on them? Her direct gaze does not settle that uncertainty. ⁴

The work is more than two metres high, made with pastel and mixed media on paper, and belongs to Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Its size matters. A medium associated with drawing occupies the wall on the scale of a substantial painting, giving the depicted woman a physical presence that the viewer must accommodate. The subtitle’s English rose also gives a familiar national image a different body and colour. Boyce’s use of paper, saturated colour and enlarged portraiture makes identity a problem to work through visually. ⁴

Hair, photography and participation

During the 1990s, Boyce increasingly created work through encounters with other people. The Audition began with an invitation advertised by Manchester’s Cornerhouse in 1997. Members of the public could attend, try on a wig and have their photographs taken. More than fifty people came; Boyce made over 900 portraits, photographing participants with and without the wigs. A seemingly simple invitation produced an extensive record of people presenting themselves to the camera. ⁵

In the resulting installation, repeated photographs sit beside nameplates. The same person can appear with natural hair and a synthetic Afro wig, sometimes alone and sometimes with others. Comparison becomes unavoidable: what has changed, and how much does the viewer assume from a hairstyle? The participants remain named individuals, while the repetition makes the act of posing visible. Boyce selected and arranged the photographs, but each sitter helped determine the gestures and expressions from which the work was made. ⁵

Hair continued to offer her a material through which familiarity, attraction and unease could meet. Whitechapel Gallery’s 2024 exhibition An Awkward Relation brought these works into conversation with the participatory art of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. Its presentation included Exquisite Tension, a 2006 video in which a Black woman and a white man have their hair braided together. Connection acquires a physical consequence: the figures’ relationship involves the joined material between them. ⁶

The exhibition also addressed the discomfort that can accompany an invitation to touch or participate. Boyce’s approach allows for hesitation as well as enthusiasm. Someone encountering a work has to negotiate what feels possible or appropriate, while the artist cannot predetermine every response. The comparison with Clark located Boyce within an international discussion about the audience’s role, while acknowledging that the two artists worked in different historical and social circumstances. ⁶

How Devotional began

One of Boyce’s most sustained projects grew from conversation in Liverpool in 1999. Working with Liverpool Black Sisters through FACT’s collaborations programme, she began collecting names of Black women who had contributed to British music. The project was originally called Motherlode and developed into Devotional. Participants’ recollections supplied a starting point for a collection of recordings, photographs, magazines and other material. Music remembered through ordinary life became a basis for research and art. ⁷

The contributions included commercially produced objects such as records, CDs, cassettes and DVDs. Their significance lay partly in the decisions behind their preservation: somebody remembered a performer, recognised a song or brought an object forward. That process made room for knowledge held outside an established archive. It also gave the project a continuing, practical task. Names could be added, material gathered and earlier contributions revisited, allowing a shared collection to develop across successive presentations. ⁷

In Devotional Wallpaper and Placards, developed between 2008 and 2018, the names themselves become an architectural presence. A single repeat of the wallpaper contains 200 hand-drawn modular sections and measures five metres by two metres. The design places musicians from different generations within an extensive, repeatable pattern. Viewers encounter the accumulated names across the wall, where reading and looking overlap. The scale gives a collective musical history room to occupy a gallery. ⁸

The design was revised annually between 2014 and 2018, with sections removed and replaced as the project changed. A related group of 100 placards, developed in 2017–18, incorporated material including magazine features and concert notices. These distinct components preserve different kinds of evidence: a name in an ornamental pattern, a performer’s public image, a trace of an event. Devotional connects remembrance with the physical formats through which music has circulated. ⁸

What different voices can do together

Boyce’s interest in sound also led to collaborations between performers whose methods were far apart. For you, only you, made in 2007, brought the early music consort Alamire together with the sound artist Mikhail Karikis. The work sets fractured vocal sounds alongside a reworking of a composition by Josquin Desprez. Musical knowledge is audible through the encounter: the participants bring different training, textures and expectations to the same performance. ⁹

In Oh Adelaide, made with sound artist Ain Bailey in 2010, Boyce returned to archival performance. Found film of the singer Adelaide Hall is interrupted by intense patches of white light. Hall and the pianist become partially obscured, then visible again, while the altered soundtrack complicates the encounter with an earlier recording. The film draws attention to the material through which a performer survives in public memory. Rediscovery can involve disturbance, interruption and an awareness of what the recording cannot restore. ⁹

Boyce has described how the remains of collaborative events become the materials of later artworks. Photographs, recordings and other documentation are selected and reworked after the participants have left. This is an important part of her authorship. Setting up an encounter is followed by decisions about its duration, arrangement and relationship to an audience. Her research has also examined the difficulty of preserving an art practice built around events that are temporary and cannot be repeated in precisely the same way. ¹⁰

Feeling Her Way at Venice

In 2022, Boyce became the first Black woman to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. ¹⁵

The musicians in Feeling Her Way are Poppy Ajudha, Jacqui Dankworth, Sofia Jernberg, Tanita Tikaram and composer Errollyn Wallen. Recording took place at Abbey Road Studios in London and Atlantis Studios in Stockholm. Four of the collaborators are British and one is Swedish. The installation places their filmed performances among patterned surfaces and golden forms, with vinyl records, CDs, books and other Devotional material displayed on plinths. The new performances occupy a space already carrying earlier musical histories. ¹

Wallen guided improvisation exercises that encouraged the singers to explore beyond their familiar performance styles. Listening to one another was part of the process, allowing an individual contribution to develop in response to someone else. The resulting work retained distinct voices and different combinations of performers. Visitors could hear changing combinations of voices as they moved between the rooms of Boyce’s installation. ¹¹

Feeling Her Way received the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2022 Venice Biennale. The work subsequently travelled to Turner Contemporary and Leeds Art Gallery in 2023. Its success brought international attention to a practice Boyce had developed over decades, combining formal decisions about images and space with the unpredictable possibilities of collaboration. ¹¹

Reading the collections again

Boyce has also worked on the histories through which art is recognised. She led Black Artists and Modernism, a research project conducted by University of the Arts London with Middlesex University between 2015 and 2018. An audit led by researcher Anjalie Dalal-Clayton identified more than 2,000 works by 363 artists in 30 British public collections. The artists included people of African, Caribbean, Asian and Middle Eastern and North African descent with connections to Britain. ¹²

The project combined that investigation with close examination of artworks, interviews, discussions and exhibitions. Its findings raised a specific institutional problem: work could be publicly owned yet rarely seen or insufficiently studied. Identifying holdings was a beginning; bringing them into displays and sustained art historical discussion required further decisions. The research extended Boyce’s attention to the conditions of visibility, while preserving the importance of an individual artwork’s materials, form and relationship to other art. ¹²

Her own institutional recognition developed alongside this work. She became a professor at University of the Arts London in 2014, holding its inaugural Chair in Black Art and Design, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2016. A damehood followed in the 2024 New Year Honours. These milestones acknowledged a long career in which making, teaching and research had developed together. ¹³

A story along the railway

Newham Trackside Wall brings Boyce’s collaborative approach back into the landscape of East London. Commissioned by Crossrail and curated by UP Projects, the artwork extends for 1.9 kilometres through Custom House, Silvertown and North Woolwich. Its printed panels combine local histories and residents’ testimonies with photographs of the streets and buildings facing the railway, recorded in 2018. Contributions from children and young people sit within a work made for an everyday public setting. ¹⁴

Boyce also designed a repeating pattern drawn from nearby plants and wildlife, taking inspiration from William Morris. The decorative surface holds different kinds of information together while allowing individual memories to remain readable. The project gives a useful measure of her work’s range: a portrait on paper, a photographed encounter, a musical archive and a railway wall can all be carefully constructed places in which people appear. Each form asks for a different kind of attention, and each makes room for particular lives and contributions to be heard. ¹⁴

Sources

1. British Council — British Council unveils Feeling Her Way by Sonia Boyce.

2. The Hyman Collection — Sonia Boyce: Biography.

3. Newham Heritage Month — Sonia Boyce OBE RA.

4. Sonia Boyce — She Ain’t Holding Them Up, She’s Holding On (Some English Rose).

5. Sonia Boyce — The Audition.

6. Whitechapel Gallery — Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation.

7. Iniva — Sonia Boyce: Scat, exhibition guide.

8. Sonia Boyce — Devotional Wallpaper and Placards.

9. Iniva — Scat: Sound and Collaboration.

10. University of the Arts London — Sonia Boyce: Research profile.

11. Sonia Boyce — Feeling Her Way.

12. University of the Arts London — Black Artists and Modernism.

13. Sonia Boyce — Biography.

14. Newham Trackside Wall — About the Artwork.

15. British Council — 2022 Sonia Boyce OBE.