Sonia Boyce OBE RA

Sonia Boyce: about the artist

Sonia Boyce OBE RA is a British Afro-Caribbean artist. She was born in Islington, London, in 1962. Growing up in Plaistow, Boyce attended Eastlea Comprehensive School in Canning Town, from 1973 to 1979. It has been noted that she was always drawing as a child, so from 1979 to 1980, she studied a Foundation Course in Art & Design at East Ham College of Art and Technology. She then went on to earn a BA degree in Fine Art at Stourbridge College from 1980 to 1983 in the West Midlands. She was the first Black British female artist to have a painting purchased by the Tate, in 1987.

Finding her artistic style

Boyce’s deeply personal work addresses the UK’s relations to race, class and gender as portrayed by the media and through day-to-day life. Primarily associated with the 1980’s Black British Arts movement, Boyce’s practice explores themes of race, gender and the nature of creativity and authorship, working across mediums including painting, drawing, photography, video and installations. She creates varied images of African diaspora women by ‘deconstructing and reconstructing … the Black female body.’ She expressed these themes through large pastel drawings and photographic collages (Big Women’s Talk, Auntie Enid – The Pose, and Missionary Position II). Boyce started a new chapter in British art history, for women, Caribbean and also political artists, with radiant imagery and a strong personal narrative. 

Influenced by Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), her early work includes colourful and feminine portraits (Missionary Position II), with images representing internal emotions through patterns and paintings depicting historical events, animals and humans. In Sonia Boyce: Beyond Blackness, art historian Anjalie Dalal-Clayton writes that the artist’s early oeuvre was influenced by feminist artists Margaret Harrison (b.1940), Kate Walker and Monica Ross (1950–2013), and used an assemblage of texts, photography, drawings and magazine clippings. ‘It was a revelation for Boyce,’ Dalal-Clayton underlines, one which would come to define her practice. 

During her time at Stourbridge College, a prestigious arts institution, she felt a sense of unease. Her intuitions on postmodernism and mixed media were dismissed as delusional. ‘It was very clear that I was somehow out of place,’ she told The Guardian in 2018; ‘the system hadn’t anticipated me, or anyone like me. Even though there were a lot of female students, they were thought about as though they were being trained to become the wives of artists, not artists themselves. As a Black person, there wasn’t a narrative at all.’ She had been threatened with expulsion from the college because she refused to go along with the pervasive insistence on making abstract art. Her work was overtly political, full of collages depicting black women in the media, partly inspired by the music she was listening to.

In 1982 she attended the first national conference of Black artists and met the Tanzanian-born painter Lubaina Himid (b.1954), a leading figure promoting the work of Black women artists and encouraging them in making positive images of themselves. Sonia soon took part in this wider Black British cultural ‘renaissance’, a movement that arose in reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism, and was embraced by artists such as Eddie Chambers (b.1960) and Horace Ové (b.1939). From that ground-breaking conference, which took place in Wolverhampton, the BLK Art Group was formed.

Dalal-Clayton writes that Boyce’s early practice was later influenced by the feminist multimedia artist and performer Susan Hiller (1940–2019) and Donald G. Rodney (1961–1998), part of the BLK Art Group whose first exhibition ‘Black Art An’ Done’ was shown at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 1984. She became close to more Black British artists including John Akomfrah (b.1957) and his Black Audio Film Collective, as well as artist and curator Zak Ové (b.1966). Her work evolved toward collaborative art. Zak recalls: ‘We all took part in the same group of artists coming out of early ventures into art together in and around Camden in London. We all felt like we were part of a family. Sonia exemplifies that sense of friendship in her work. She includes that closeness, offers positivity and radiance.’ 

When Boyce was only 25, in 1987, Tate Modern bought her drawing Missionary Position II, making her the first British Black female artist to enter the collection. Her early works were large chalk-and-pastel drawings depicting friends, family and childhood experiences. Drawing from her background she often included depictions of wallpaper patterns and bright colours associated with the Caribbean. Through this work, the artist examined her position as a Black woman in Britain and the historical events in which that experience was rooted.

Her early work had a more didactic style than her later pieces; ‘I’m preoccupied with investigating how the artwork can have a life of its own that transcends the need to tell people what to think’. More recently, she often collaborates with other artists and the public, encouraging improvisation and spontaneous performative actions to take place.

About the piece

In her self-portrait, She Ain’t Holding Them Up, She’s Holding On, Boyce gives space to Black female presence. Boyce’s muscular arms show her power and her fixed-gaze communicates resilience. The black roses printed on her pink dress are a play on the phrase, ‘English rose’. With her vivid blue dreadlocks, Boyce asserts that Black women are beautiful too. At the top of the image, a sliver of sea and sunshine represent her distant but unforgotten roots. 

The painting depicts her as the second-generation daughter of her Windrush family, in a strikingly ambiguous image of dependency and support. The piece is heavily inspired by Frida Kahlo, who was still relatively unknown in the UK at the time, whose work Boyce had recently seen at an exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery. She Ain’t Holding Them Up, She’s Holding On foregrounds Boyce’s own life in a comparable way to Kahlo’s self portraiture.

Research by Hafza Yusuf and Katherine Liggins