Art As Activism: Heather Agyepong
The English artist in conversation with art curator, historian and educator Antoine J. Girard.
Art as Activism started as a response to the injustices and inequalities present in the art world; it furthered the important work of making space for artists of color. The series continues with Heather Agyepong, a British multidisciplinary artist whose body of work explores mental health through photography and movement.
—Antoine J. Girard
NAME: Heather Agyepong
LOCATION: London, UK
MEDIUM: Multidisciplinary artist and actor
Tell me a little about yourself as a person and as an artist.
I’m Heather Agyepong. My pronouns are she and her. I’m based in London. I'm now calling myself a multidisciplinary artist and actor. Before, I was calling myself a visual artist, performer; all of these things.
I've been so reluctant about [calling myself an artist] because I didn't go to art school. I hung around a lot of art school kids and wasn’t digging how they presented themselves as artists. They felt very isolated, super opinionated and dressed a certain way, which felt performative and made me feel tired. So I was just like, "Oh, I'm not an artist."
As my practice started to tear off to other mediums, I told myself, "Heather, you're an artist." I’ve only been calling myself an artist for maybe the last two or three years.
Anxiety is really common amongst my artist friends. I’m in that space too as I think about trying to define myself as a thinker. How many shows do you do until you're officially a curator? I’m interested to hear about your earliest memories of art and how it resonated with you.
This isn’t going to be a very good answer but I'm going to say it anyway. As an actor, I remember going to see a musical, which might have been The Lion King. I just kept crying because I'd never seen dark-skinned Black performers before and everyone was captivated by them. I was probably 16. At the end, I stood up and I was crying and clapping. I was so overwhelmed by all of it and I told myself, "I want to do that." Something about that agency and power—I was really drawn to it.
What originally drew you to dance as a medium?
I wouldn't even call [what I do] dance, I would call it movement. This project, The Body Remembers, was about listening to myself. It was going to be a lens-based project, but in 2018 I really wanted to move my body and my muscles. I was like, "What is all of that about?"
My work is about mental health, so the more I researched it, the more I learned how trauma is held in the body and how the body is this carrier of pain, of memories, of movement. Dance therapy can help with catharsis and relieving that.
It was a shift of cerebral energy for me to listen to what my body needed. The project was birthed organically through that.
The multidisciplinary nature of my work is due to needing different tools. "Oh, I need a camera for this thing," or "I need to dance for this thing." That's how my practice developed.
It’s inspiring to think about the ways our people are expressing themselves in the system we were born into. Once we found freedom in art, there was no turning back. I'm impressed by your decision to explore movement. I feel like that was probably a hard choice, to trust that or to get deeper into it.
In my art practice, if I don't honor myself, something always comes back to bite me. If I accept a commission and I don't feel right about it, I'm always like, "Why did I do this thing?" I'm just trying to listen to myself because there's a history of silencing both myself and my community, not listening to the instinct, trying to adapt and assimilate. That has not helped me in my life, on a whole.
I feel like every time I make a project that is really truthful, something sheds off me. I feel like for this shedding to continue, I need to keep going back to what I really need to do. What is my body saying? What is the thing I have to be truthful to?
Do your performances vary based on how you feel at that moment?
This project is my first movement project ever. Everything else has been photography and acting. This is the first time I'm working in this medium. The nature of this particular project is that it's all impulse, so every performance you go to will be different because it's about what's happening in my heart, what's happening in my hands and whatever comes out, comes out. It is super vulnerable.
No one knows what's going to happen really, but I need to trust that whatever happens, I'm being truthful and I'm in the moment and that's all. Everything else, whatever the piece looks like, it's not up to me.
What does that normally feel like for you when you've arrived [at the culmination of a project]?
I give myself a time limit. This project is going to last a year and then it's done. I can't go back. I need to have boundaries. When I'm boundaried, I feel like I have maximum freedom of expression during that time. And then it's done. If it's too open-ended, it never gets to the heart of what I'm trying to do.
Do you come from an expressive background? Were your parents or people around you growing up supportive?
Oh, major. My family is from Ghana. [My parents] weren't against me being a creative. They just wanted me to survive because it was really hard for them. I think the resentment that I had [about that], it became compassion like, "Oh, it's because you guys care about me and you don't want me to be broke. I get it."
Sometimes, in first-generation [immigrants] it’s all about working and surviving. There's no pleasure. There's no time for desire or self-expression or reflection because that hasn't served them at all. We've seen the repercussions of that, intergenerational trauma. There's the residue that’s left. I have the responsibility to unlearn that for them and for me. That's deeply rooted in my work too, finding that freedom.
I love you so much for bringing up the realities of the things that we felt as a culture, putting it into your work. Your work doesn't strike me as stuff that's art for art's sake. It seems like art to move us forward. The question is,“How do we find images and energies that can unpack that so that when you leave, you have more tools than what you walked into?” As an artist of color, do you feel like there's a responsibility to include politics in your work?
As a dark-skinned Black woman, whatever I do is politicized. I remember I did a project and I was holding a flower. People asked me what the flower meant about being Black. It was just a flower. That's all it was. They were all red-faced and embarrassed, but it was about people projecting as I’m trying to figure out how to reclaim my gaze. The work is always personal because I need to get something out of it first.
For a period of time, my work was about the burden of being Black and what I was trying to say about the whole community. I had the realization that my work was about me and if I make it purely about me and am honest with myself, I will do the same work, do the same uplifting and expand on narratives.
You're so realized as a person. You say those things confidently and I'm learning from this conversation how to treat myself better too. In the midst of wanting to be an agent for change, we can get so lost and distracted. That's why I love how these conversations keep going because we are so much better together than we are apart. If you could change one thing about misunderstandings around your art, what would those be?
I didn't go to art school and sometimes I’ve got a problem with language and this overly academic, opaque way of talking about art which can make it really inaccessible. If I'm honest, if I didn't find people like you, I could be like, "Art isn't for me."
My fear is there'll be artists who are from South London or where I'm from, who don't communicate in a certain way and they feel like they can’t be artists because, despite having incredible imaginations, they just don't have that level of access and are denied their artistry because of that. That's something that frustrates me. I love criticism, but making the language of how we talk about art wider is something I'm really passionate about.