Addressing social ills against women through art

By Venessa Deosaran

Akima McPherson is a multimedia artist who uses her art for activism
Akima McPherson first trained as a painter at the E.R Burrowes School of Art then at the University of Guyana.  Since her first professional exhibition with the Guyana Women Artists’ Association in November 2001, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, mostly in Guyana, and usually with paintings.  In 2006, her painting ‘Chakra Meditation’ was featured in the Clico Art Calendar Caribbean Women Art.  In 2006 and 2008, her work was selected to be part of the Guyana visual art exhibitions at CARIFESTA IX (Trinidad) and CARIFESTA X (Guyana), respectively.
In 2010, she received a Commonwealth Scholarship to pursue a one-year MA in the United Kingdom.  She completed the one-year MA Art and Space at Kingston University London in September 2011, under tutelage of Cullinan Richards (British Art Show 7).  Her art has since expanded to include sculpture, text, sound, film and photography.
In an interview with Guyana Times Sunday Magazine, Akima said she was moved to become an artist when she enrolled to pursue studies in the arts with the intention that painting would be something adjunct to a career as an architect.  But somewhere along the way she decided that the parameters of being an architect in Guyana would not allow her the chance to express herself in the way she wanted but art would.  So she committed herself to art.
“My experience in the UK while in pursuit of my MA was incredible!  I got a chance to immerse myself in contemporary art practices and saw numerous works I had admired on the pages of art history and art theory texts.  I felt like a chocolate lover let loose in a chocolate paradise.  And the wonderful thing is that I was not silenced because of where I came from or what my sensibilities were in comparison to what I saw around me for art.  There was so much variation in the discourse on art, I feasted.  Now I’m eager to see the responses to the work I do here in Guyana, especially as much of it is a striking departure from what I did as a painter prior to my time out,” the artist disclosed.
Akima explained that her inspiration is sourced from the Chakra philosophy. When she graduated from UG, she was very engaged, that is, using her individual experiences as a female and trying to make statements of a universal nature (for the benefit of women).  Then she became involved with Chakra meditation and found expression in her work as well; the work she did concerned itself with the making of objects of meditation.  Her premise is that humankind needs to get connected with the divine within, so the images she made came out of a process of meditation, and were intended to function as objects of meditation.

“My interest in Chakra philosophy reoccurs in my work in subtle ways.  I have a couple paintings ‘In Tandem I’ and ‘In Tandem III’ and they merge Chakra and Christian elements, I think seamlessly, so people don’t even realise I’m involved with this content.  It amuses me.  But the point was that there are shared elements between these two systems and so let’s use them to draw us into knowing each other rather than in being contentious with one another.  The work I do now returns to earlier concerns regarding experiences of the gender female (the subject matter of the paintings of the ‘Moodscape/Introspection’ series).  I’ve done work and continue to do work referencing rape as a weapon of war; specifically I’m looking at the horrors of the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo –it’s dreadful,” she said.
The artist said there is much that is needed to improve the situation within the arts industry but most importantly we need to have greater currency in our art practices.  “There is so much that has been happening in the world art’s centres but we in Guyana, as a collective, are disconnected from the forms and content of that work and thus not able to work in times relevant modes that can possibly bring a wider audience of Guyanese to a situation of engagement with art.  We need better relationships with our peers in the Caribbean.  There are artists in the region working with contemporary materials and methods and still very much thematically engaged with concerns of the Caribbean as individual territories and a collective.  In short I’m grieved by the insular nature of our community,” she said.
Akima does a lot of research on her art. For instance, for her current artwork she used news reports from varied credible sources, reports from Human Rights Watch and other credible bodies.  “Reading the stories of the women I encounter in research is hard but I keep doing so because the form of the work and the content is informed by their accounts.  I’m interested in using my art to address social ills.  The difference between my work today and the work of 5 years ago or even 10 years ago is that I am bolder in my statements and taking on the hard stuff,” the artist explained.
For more information on Akima’s work visit www.wix.com/kima_mc/akimamcpherson (Taken from Guyana Times Sunday Magazine)