Kabe Wilson: On Being Still

Kabe Wilson, On Being Still, 19 December 2020

Guest Blog: Lisa Hutchins 

Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves breaking spread their white fans far out over the shore, sent white shadows into the recesses of sonorous caves and then rolled back sighing over the shingle.

The beach, Hove. Kabe Wilson is 19, entering adulthood with his first show as an artist in Brighton. He is reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf and is nearing its end. He wants to finish the book as he sits on the beach. He feels it has been a profound experience that has seemed to change his perception of the world, allowing him to experience deep time. He takes a digital camera, still a relatively new thing, not the ubiquitous object the phone camera has since become. He shoots some grainy footage of the waves breaking on the beach.

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For its final pre-Christmas event Literature Cambridge welcomed back Wilson, now a multimedia artist focusing on literary adaptations, to discuss his creative practice and the inspiration he has found in Woolf and her circle. He told us how, after some years producing work on this theme, he was not expecting to return to it again, but his renewed engagement was a product of the unusual year we have just experienced. He explained the deep sense of connection he gets from the idea of sharing spaces across time, and of people interacting across spaces, and discussed how he created On Being Still, a retrospective diary piece with a nod to Woolf’s own diaries. Published in The Modernist Review, it sits alongside the Brighton paintings he was working on when the March lockdown was announced. 

Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell and their circle had many connections with Brighton and its surroundings. Paintings by Bell and Duncan Grant show Brighton beach, its piers (both then fully standing), local lighthouses and nearby landscapes. Additionally, Woolf mentions Brighton several times in her letters and diaries. Kabe described how at first he thrived during lockdown, filling his days with painting and reading, exploring the visual legacy of Brighton’s Victorian heritage. This included the Pavilion, the bandstand and the intricate ironwork of seafront railings and monumental lamp-posts. Always at the back of his mind, though, was how these objects are not politically neutral, being steeped in the culture of colonialism and with a significant amount of the city’s historic wealth coming from the proceeds of slavery. And, while Grant’s and Bell’s work show beautiful views of the Seven Sisters and English Channel, these areas are now freighted with political significance and are the site of the deaths of migrants and refugees trying to enter the UK.

Kabe started to research Woolf’s letters and diaries, looking for references to the locations that featured in his work. He was envisaging an exhibition at Charleston with his paintings shown alongside works by Bell and Grant, and interspersed with texts by Woolf. Then, towards the end of May a Black man named Christian Cooper was reported to the police simply for birdwatching in Central Park, New York. Soon after, George Floyd died at the hands of police in Minneapolis, sparking a wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the world. Kabe’s reactions to these events as an artist and as a Black man are detailed very powerfully in the central section of On Being Still and should be read in his own words there. The combination of lockdown isolation and curtailment of his creative practice, daily evidence of endemic violence against Black people, and discovering overtly racist language used by Woolf in her diaries led him to a painful mixture of hope and negativity, a dip in confidence about his creative practice and a loss of the sense of fun, optimism and pleasure that had previously featured in his work. He told us the low point of his year came in early June, as Donald Trump was dispatching the military in Washington DC against Black Lives Matter protestors. Completing a detailed picture of the Pavilion and noting how its visual iconography was rooted in cultural appropriation was particularly distressing against this background. 

The final section of On Being Still details how Kabe recovered his ability to work and his connection with the world of Bloomsbury, not least by re-stating the importance of Black history within Charleston and Brighton more widely. He achieved this by studying Duncan Grant’s recently-discovered interracial erotic drawings, a photograph of Haile Selassie visiting Brighton’s West Pier and a portrait by Grant of his lover and model Patrick Nelson. Working on a picture of the waves, and then learning Grant had painted from an almost identical spot, helped him finish his Brighton series. He notes at the end of On Being Still: ‘August 15th. Finished, the whole series. Lily Briscoe moment. And finally moving – getting the train to Brighton in two days, I’ll feel like James on the boat.’

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To end his talk Kabe shared the footage of the waves he filmed around 15 years earlier, rediscovered while sorting through old computer files. It was a moving end to an honest, funny, painful, perceptive and original contribution to the Virginia Woolf Season in which he offered with great generosity precisely the sense of connection that he had identified as so important.

The waves broke on the shore.

• The next session in the Woolf Season, Women in Mrs Dalloway, will be given by Trudi Tate on Saturday January 9 at 6pm and repeated on Sunday January 10 at 10am.

• Article on Patrick Nelson and Duncan Grant, Frieze magazine (2019).

• Kabe Wilson’s art webpage. Prints of the paintings are for sale.