Paulette
Writer and DJ
I did an exhibition in 2018 called Homebird. I'd never curated an art exhibition before in my entire life. I'm a DJ. I'm a radio presenter, music industry consultant, done lots of things - but I've never made art.
The director of visual arts, Michael Simpson, contacted me, we met and we talked about art and the kind of artists that I like. I mentioned artists including Barbara Kruger to Basquiat. I like everything - renaissance painting, sculpture, fashion, literature. I talked about Louise Bourgeois, I talked about Yayoi Kusama and Amy Sherald. Artists that I follow, that influenced me and that speak to me.
Michael said, ‘We're interested in you doing a gallery interruption. What kind of story would you tell if you were to create an exhibition?’ I went away and had a think about it, and I came up with this idea, which was to tell the story of my life up until the point that I came back to Manchester. I'm a first-generation black British citizen, child of immigrants, brought up in white Jewish, white Irish areas, educated in prestigious Catholic schools. Yet my family were the only black family on our street.
I wanted to talk about that experience of growing up in a very white Britain, being the first generation to do so and to be educated, to work, to find a job, to go out, socialise, listen to the radio, watch TV. I just wanted to talk about that experience that has defined the person I've become.
I chose the name Homebird because I've been to lots of places. I lived in London for ten years. I lived in Paris for nearly ten years, and I lived in Spain for nearly three years, and then I came back to Manchester. It’s this idea of a homing pigeon, that I came back to go forward.
But birds also have the best view. They have this aerial perspective. I wanted to think of the exhibition as looking down on this landscape and a life experience which was so multifaceted. For people to get that view of what it is to be the child of immigrants growing up in this country that, at the start, didn't necessarily want us here, and see that X years later, we still have that friction.
The exhibition gave me carte blanche to discuss that in a way that wasn't just words on the page. I used music, I used images, I used fashion, I used words on the walls. I used all sorts of different media to tell this story. Then the maze construction was used to symbolize what it is to go inside, examine our thoughts and work on the brain and our mental health. Music was at the healing heart of it all. And that is how I came to work with Lowry.
I am painfully aware that we are taught history in a one-sided way. The beauty for me as a history student, and as a human being, is that history has happened and is happening every second of the day to everybody all around the world, in parallel. There are billions of different histories, billions of different perspectives of even the same event, because from wherever you stand in the room, everybody's seeing something different, just slightly off to the right, slightly off to the left, but it's happening the same day, same time, everywhere.
That's how important it is to say that everybody's experience is relevant. Even if you think about the way your house was growing up: the curtains that your parents had or the carpet that they really loved, the armchair that your granddad sat in it; it all time stamps the experience. It's history that is living and we don't even see it.
It's of interest to us as archivists and as creatives to tell those stories. We can all contribute something, even just that we're there and seeing it and thinking about it and taking on those lessons for ourselves. History evolves. It changes us. It changes the way we think about how we do things or how we are with people, and how we think about being or recognizing / respecting immigrants, and how we think about women, men, sexuality, politics and even how we think about what we watch on TV. History should be expansive and inclusive not reductive and exclusive.
As part of the exhibition I created a TV wall, which I worked on with the designer Sean Longmore. We created this wall-sized mock-up page that looked like the TV Times. It looked legit but when you looked closer, it was programmes that I'd watched as a child to present day that had influenced me. So at the start of the day, it was Sesame Street and Pipkins, because they were the only two programmes I saw black people on growing up. Then it was Play School and Play Away, because Floella Benjamin and Carmen McRae were the first black women that I saw on TV that weren't cast as nurses or robbers in a show, they were educating everybody.
It spoke to me as a little black kid, because if they're on TV, then there may be this place for me to do that. When the Six O'Clock News was presented by Trevor McDonald and Moira Stuart, the first black people to hold the nation's attention, to tell the nation what was going on in the news, it was groundbreaking. Those two people held such authority. It was interesting to me to create that TV wall, because people don't realise how little black and brown people saw themselves on the screen and are allowed to see themselves in the world.
The other side of it is how much that little glimpse can influence and inspire us. For me, seeing Grace Jones on Top of the Pops was major. Because up until then, the black women that were performing on the stage were Gloria Gaynor or Diana Ross, big hair, spangles, sequins, it was all about the glamour. And Grace Jones was a tomboy, she wasn't a girly girl, she wasn't big hair, false nails and big shoes. She showed me that you can exist like this, that you can be androgynous, that you can have a flat top, that you can wear a man's suit with nothing underneath it, and high heels and absolutely kick it.
When I started to DJ, Grace Jones was someone that I drew on as an inspiration for who I was behind the decks, because I wasn’t aware of any other female DJs in 1990, so there wasn't anybody that I could really base my look on. She powered who I became, in terms of being a DJ and a performer. Homebird gave me the platform to explore this and in doing that, maybe I became that person for somebody else.
I created a Spotify playlist that was the heart of the exhibition. There were headphones so people could listen to the music and the playlists adorned the walls. I split the music decade by decade: there were tracks that I’d heard on the radio, or tracks that I bought or played, songs that featured as I became a schoolgirl, that formed me as teenager with a paper round so I could buy records, going to clubs as a student, becoming a DJ, moving to London, working for the music industry. The music told that story of becoming.
I wanted people to listen to the music and think, I loved that Bowie record, or that Roxy record or think, she’s into that? I wanted people to put themselves into the story and ask themselves, what they were into in 1972?
When I was born, my mum was listening to jazz, blues, r n b so there was Up Jumped The Rabbit on the playlist, just this whole mix of styles. I asked people to write on cards which was their favourite piece of music, and they were regularly and proficiently filled out.
People might think, oh, being a DJ that's dead glamorous. But then, part of the exhibition was a family wall with photos of my sisters, my brother, my mum, my dad, the dog, because that is also the history of me. That is all our history. If you look at what's happening in the war-torn parts of the world, when those cultures and histories get destroyed it's devastating. It’s important to archive all that information, and to appreciate how important those social structures are, how important community is to us as human beings. It keeps a sense of our humanity.
When you look at the United States, they’re defunding galleries and taking out artefacts from the Smithsonian and pretending that certain histories don’t exist - it’s the responsibility of places like the Lowry to focus on the archives and keep that secure.
It’s art’s responsibility to respect and keep telling those stories - old, new and whatever people can conceptualise for the future. Black Lives Matter hadn’t become well-known at that time, but so much of the exhibition touched on that. If I were to do this exhibition today, that hashtag would be going straight on there because it is fundamental to my story.
When I finished Homebird I had a three-week dark period. When you start to dig around in this head stuff you’d better be prepared for what comes next. It was very much a recalibration of self, because the exhibition had all been about identity. The way I am, and the person I am has certainly changed in doing it: now I am a lot more comfortable with having ‘uncomfortable’ conversations with people.
I’m not sure where my connection to art actually comes from. It's an interest that I have always had, I’ve always felt an affinity to museums and art galleries and the knowledge that comes from walking around and seeing how different people present their lives and histories. I've always wanted to share that. I’ wouldn’t say I’m an artist. I am not Yayoi Kusama. I am not Bridget Riley, or a woman who sits in a garret painting, but the Lowry gave me the team, resources and space to prove that I could be. I'm just a normal person who's happened to have lots of experiences of life that I've managed to describe in different ways.
One of the nicest things to come out of it is the personal relationships that I have developed. I’d love to do something with the Lowry again. It’s shown a completely different facet of who I am. I think that’s what the Lowry is really good at; telling stories from the margins. Bringing disparate people’s stories together and putting them on stage. Just showing that diversity of what it is to be human in this world.
I think the Lowry will continue to support new talent. It’s very supportive of local talent, and long may that continue. It only takes one person to believe in what you do to make a difference to the path that your life takes and make a difference to the world. And I think that kind of relationship cannot be undersold or understated. In terms of what it means to me, it gave me the courage to look deep inside and the confidence to have more of these conversations openly. It’s important to catch people like this and support them when they need it.
