Collage for a New World with Jazz Grant
The Hand-Cut Work of Black Collectivity
- Text: Claire Marie Healy
- Images/Photos Courtesy Of: Jazz Grant
This year has cut out a fresh space for the art of collage, which is, after all, a practice that requires only a desk, a pair of scissors, and an eye for distilling chaos into a singular point of view. The form provides a place to take solace in: a structure that can contain all our overflowing references in chorus; an object that, even when viewed through a screen, has the ghost of a physical presence. The work of emerging London-based collage artist Jazz Grant is testament to this expansiveness. Like Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series—another project that chimes with a collective will of 2020—Grant’s entirely hand-cut work contains a kind of Black collectivity and community that is stitched together with both protest and joy. Her small human figures are harmonious with the environments they occupy because she needs them to be. The tactility of the page and the lack of digital manipulation create balance, urgent in its delivery, especially now.
“I’m fascinated by the creation of new worlds,” says Grant, showing me her corner in the North London studio she shares, when we meet. “Collage makes it so easy to do that.” Above her desk, the white brick walls are a constellation of equally spaced, miniature collages, some that I recognize from her Instagram, and others clearly in progress. Clouds, dense tropical foliage, fiery sunsets, and solar eruptions from NASA’s monitoring of the sun; among these are bodies, en masse or in silhouette, driving cars, on trains, coming together. For a couple of weeks, Grant has been trying to make something of this cluster of materials, photographs from her trip to Sri Lanka last year: reappropriated to 2020, naturally, and she’s thinking about eschatology—the end of the world. “There are two ways you can look at the word. There's one which is a devastating pit of hell. Doomsday! But then there is a more mystical version. I am really interested in that—a planet comes into our atmosphere and changes everything, so the world becomes something else.”
Left Image: Jazz Grant, Rhyging Sun Stills, 2020. Right Image: Jazz Grant x Missohio, Don't Look Directly into the SUN, 2020. Top Image: Jazz Grant, Beautiful Jamaica 2, 2020. "
Grant’s turning point as an artist came at the tail end of last year. After initially studying fashion design at London College of Fashion, an invitation from designer Bianca Saunders to be part of a group show in Brixton made Grant reconsider her collages as something more than casual. Since then, she has collaborated with brands like Nike, home-grown community projects like The Black Curriculum’s zine dedicated to Notting Hill Carnival, artists like Noname, and photographers like Missohio (the duo is her sister, Maya, and her boyfriend), Aria Dean, and Amber Pinkerton. But the more clients come her way with their attendant expectations, the more the 28-year-old is digging down into what is essential to her own making: namely, cutting out and scanning directly from books and printed ephemera, and never digitally manipulating them for scale. For Grant, when it comes to carving out utopia in dystopia, it’s all about working with what you’ve got.
On my way to meet Grant, I saw a blue plaque from the window of the top floor of the 67 bus: "Luke Howard, Namer of Clouds lived and died here." The sign is typical of the U.K. Heritage scheme in that it links a typically white, male historical figure with a building; but the sentiment felt more expansive, something to make the observer look way up, not down. Grant’s collages are like that—they contain atmospheres, rising and falling in infinite variations. And though her excavation and celebration of the materials of Black history and communal memory might feel as far from a blue plaque as you can get, the encounter did make me think of how we might come to know those materials by another name through her work. Collaging is a kind of renaming after all.
There was a quote of Kara Walker’s where she says she knows if she just has some paper and some scissors she can go into a room and she can make something. There's a certain confidence that comes with that.
100%. I had never really thought of her as someone that my work aligned with, but I saw an interview where she spoke about why she uses silhouette. She said it was almost like a "fuck you" to painting. This is the lowest form of art, supposedly: just cut-outs. I’ve always liked that it was sort of crude. And I was always frustrated that I couldn’t draw. I draw with the way that I cut. I realized that with the collages, it was worth spending time on it. It wouldn't exist otherwise.
Obviously you were studying fashion design for a while, so it’s interesting coming to this. Does the fact that collage was just for you at first give you a kind of freedom?
My mental attachment to [doing fashion] gave me so much grief. My mum even said to me—I really remember this—"Have you ever thought about doing something else?" I was like, "What do you mean, there’s no way!" [But] it must have resonated with me because suddenly I did let it go, you know? I would do the collages for my family and my boyfriend as gifts at first. Stingy! [Laughs]
You also worked with Grace Wales Bonner for a time. Do you feel a creative kinship with her?
I was talking to someone about this recently and they described it similarly. [Her] graduate show felt like it was something that I had been waiting for. A lot of people were like, finally! I know we were talking earlier about [Perry Henzell’s film] The Harder They Come. The thing that drew me to menswear was looking at Jamaican style. My dad's parents are Jamaican, they came over on the Windrush, and he was born in Luton. He had an infatuation with Jamaica. He used to say when he was younger, he was British by birth, but Jamaican by will and inclination. And his own Dad would say, "Shut up, you’re British." It’s incredible when you think about Jamaicans [who have] come over to the U.K., what they’ve had to change in order to acclimatize, what they brought with them, and what they chose to leave behind. I saw something of that in Grace’s work, and I thought that was something I would be interested in tapping into as well.
Was your household a visual one, growing up?
My dad is very academic—he writes books. The first book he wrote was called Negro with a Hat, about Marcus Garvey. I'm actually reading it now properly. When I was 16 I gave it a go, do you know what I mean! And my mum studied art. She had me at a student house in Glasgow School of Art, so I had a Glasweigian accent when I was two! So funny. And then they both moved to Brighton when I was really young. I remember she used to do these really cool ad-hoc exhibitions with her friends in abandoned buildings in Brighton. She used to do these incredible sculptures with little faces on them, and collect newspapers and cut out all the heads of politicians, [and] draw around them. I always found it difficult because I didn’t know how I wanted to be creative. I thought it was fashion, but I was always coming up against something. But I knew that I wanted to be in a creative place. She would always help me and we would figure things out [together].
Jazz Grant x Missohio, Many Arif's, 2020.
Jazz Grant x Aria Shahrokhshahi, Abdou and Ebrima, 2020.
Within the particular context of this isolation period, I feel this kind of comfort in your work. A sense of calm. And this is despite all these different elements at play—including large crowds, including ideas and images of protest. How do you strike that balance?
I like those collections of words. The calmness might come with a balance. When a piece of work is complete, it’s basically when the balance feels right. I always get really blown away by the sheer volume of people in the world. There's almost like a human filter that stops us from really coming to terms with that. You do get overwhelmed by the negative aspects of humanity, but then [you have] protests happening globally. You can't help but feel a bit of hope when you recognize that. I think that’s where crowds and my interest in them comes from [too]—a feeling of unity. Like the crowds in this Nelson Mandela book I found in a charity shop. There's incredible source material: some of them are really aggressive—not that the people were aggressive, but it was tense, they were trapped. They were protesting something that was really awful. But some crowds are at a political concert, just having fun. There's joy. But what they both have is unity. And they both have hope. There's something really beautiful about people coming together.
Jazz Grant, Divine, 2020.
And your bodies stay whole, you don’t cut into them. Lorna Simpson has said she pulls her bodies apart to achieve a sense of centering when she puts them back together. What kind of movement is happening for you, what kind of feelings, when you collage?
I think it’s actually more of a diving into.
It’s hard not to be cynical when Black women collage artists who have been producing work for a long time are suddenly receiving this new kind of attention, all these articles. How do you negotiate the parameters of this attention?
There's an internal battle to be had there. Like the Harlem Renaissance—a lot of younger Black people thought, "We're here now, like we're here to stay." You know, this happened in 1920. And then it finished in like, 1928. That obviously being a hundred years ago. I think we have to be cautious [about] an end point. It wasn't to be expected that we would have this sudden shift in attention—because we've had Black Lives Matter before, we've had Black people dying in all sorts of ways. History's interesting for that reason. You can’t predict, really, you just have to reflect.
Claire Marie Healy is a London-based writer and editor, currently Editor of Dazed & Confused.
- Text: Claire Marie Healy
- Images/Photos Courtesy Of: Jazz Grant
- Date: December 10th, 2020
