Maud Sulter: You Are My Kindred Spirit

This show focuses on Sulter’s moving-image and spoken-word archives, in which warmth, familial relationships and a political poetics are brought into resounding harmony, as she explores her Scottish Ghanaian heritage

Maud Sulter: You Are My Kindred Spirit, iInstallation view, Tramway, Glasgow, 23 November 2024 – 30 March 2025. Photo: Keith Hunter.

Tramway, Glasgow
23 November 2024 – 30 March 2025

by BETH WILLIAMSON

This immersive exhibition of work by the Scottish-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter (1960-2008) showing at Glasgow’s Tramway is the first of its kind. Bringing together Sulter’s work as a poet, artist, photographer and writer, as well as her endeavours as a curator, gallerist and publisher, the exhibition focuses on her captivating moving-image and spoken-word archives. What makes this material so fascinating is that it is rooted in Sulter’s family archive and her Scottish-Ghanaian roots, born, as she was, in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, close to the Tramway itself. The central role of voice in this exhibition, Sulter’s own voice, is key. Exploring themes of diaspora, family, story, memoir and history in Scots vernacular and Old Scots language, Sulter called herself a Glaswegian Ghanaian and her love of language echoes in Tramway’s cavernous spaces, bringing warmth, familial relationships and a political poetics into resounding harmony.

Maud Sulter, Self-portrait, 2001-2. Large format Polaroid. © Estate of Maud Sulter. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow.

In 2015, Maud Sulter: Passion, an exhibition at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow and an accompanying publication on the artist’s work, aimed to bring Sulter’s work out from the shadows as an artistic practice that had been overlooked, despite it permeating almost every aspect of Scottish contemporary culture. On that occasion, the Scottish academic and cultural commentator Murdo Macdonald called Sulter “one of the outstanding photographic thinkers of her generation”. Yet, here we are almost a decade later attempting the same thing once again. This time, of course, the focus has shifted towards moving image and voice in her work, which makes sense when we consider Sulter’s background and interests. In an interview in 1991 she said: “I feel that the influence of my mother in terms of an encouragement of reading and understanding writing was also part of my grandfather’s influence – he himself wrote poetry. And so, I grew up with a very narrative, descriptive environment.” She was a voracious reader, devouring everything from William Dunbar to Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein and Essex Hemphill. Further, she interviewed contemporary Black female writers such as Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and Ntozake Shange. Couple all this with an oral tradition of exchanging stories in Glasgow and you begin to get a sense of where Sulter was coming from.

Maud Sulter: You Are My Kindred Spirit, iInstallation view, Tramway, Glasgow, 23 November 2024 – 30 March 2025. Photo: Keith Hunter.

Sulter’s film footage in No Oxbridge Spires (1998) records a family walk in the Gorbals that reaches its end outside her boarded-up childhood home. The sound track is uncontrived with naturally evolving recollections of the Glasgow of her childhood. Such memories also appear in Memories of Childhood (1993), as well as archival photographs of her mother, Elsie. Sulter’s use of family photographs in her work sometimes evoke happy memories but, at other times, brings more distressing images into view. Elsewhere in the exhibition we see My Father’s House (1996), footage of her father’s three-day funeral ceremonies in Ghana in 1995 – the artist did not meet her father before his death. Once again, sound is a significant element as mourners speak in the Ghanaian language Fanti, a branch of Twi.

The multivalent fascination of Alba (1995) is deep and enduring.  Combining poetry with visual art and historic narratives. Sulter’s first major installation project, Alba was commissioned in 1995 by CCA Glasgow and toured to Preston. At Tramway, archival images of the Preston installation have been printed on textile panels hung to echo the original installation. The embodied experience of poetry this elicits in the viewer is profound. Sulter’s narrative delves into the imagined lives of Black women in medieval Scotland. One of the first references to someone of African origin living in Scotland was in Dunbar’s poem Of Ane Blak-Moir. Dunbar was employed in the court of James IV in the 16th century and his poem probably references two ladies-in-waiting known as Ellen and Margaret.

Maud Sulter, Duval et Dumas, 1993, from the series Syrcas, photographic print. © Estate of Maud Sulter. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow.

Syrcas (1993)/Blood Money (1995) is another powerful work, stretching the length of Tramway’s longest wall. Here digital slide projections of scans from original photocollages are accompanied by spoken word featuring Sulter reading her poem Blood Money. Syrcas interrogates the forgotten history of the genocide of Black Europeans during the Holocaust. The artist juxtaposes images from the canon of western art history with African art objects, layered on vintage postcards of Alpine scenes. In this way, she questions how the histories of people, land and artefacts are obscured and even erased by the legacies of imperialism, as well as ideas of the exotic and the other. Syrcas is exhibited with her poem Blood Money, a horrific story of a young African woman and her family in wartime, managing the perpetual threat of discrimination, violence and persecution. Sulter took her inspiration from the German photographer August Sander’s Circus Workers (1926-32).

Maud Sulter,Syrcas. Hélas l’héroine Quelques instants plus tard, Monique cherchait sa brosse à cheveux, 1993, from the series Syrcas, photographic print. © Estate of Maud Sulter. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow.

In the truly shocking video work Plantation (1995), Sulter uses her own body to bring the overlooked stories of women of colour to the fore. This time, it is Bertha Antoinette Mason, a fictional character from the 1847 novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I first came across Bertha, Eyre’s mad woman in the attic, in Jean Rhys’ prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), 25 years ago and so to encounter her again here in Sulter’s creative reimagining was particularly special. Sulter’s video of female reconstructive surgery (part of Plantation) features a surgical operation she underwent, performed by Vicki Hufnagel MD, who believes that 90% of hysterectomies carried out in the US are unnecessary. Sulter’s womb is removed, mended, sewn, repaired and returned to her body. In her original artist’s statement for Plantation, Sulter noted of Hufnagel: “Her work is based on conservation and repair. Her nurturing saved my womb. I thank her.”

Maud Sulter: You Are My Kindred Spirit, iInstallation view, Tramway, Glasgow, 23 November 2024 – 30 March 2025. Photo: Keith Hunter.

Sulter often reimagined herself in her work in a variety of guises and claiming agency for Black women – those who had been overlooked or erased. In Les Bijoux I-IX (2002), a series of confrontational portraits, she addresses the role of Jeanne Duval, muse and companion to the French critic and poet Charles Baudelaire. Duval supported Baudelaire financially and inspired some of his most important works. In Les Bijoux, Duval is portrayed as independent, present and powerful, gazing out confidently at the viewer. That is the image of Sulter we come away with too – someone creative, unashamed and proud of her Scottish Ghanaian heritage. Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple when she was growing up or carving out her career. Now, perhaps, her achievements in word and image can be seen for the strong creative and political, and simply remarkable statements they are.

Maud Sulter: You Are My Kindred Spirit, iInstallation view, Tramway, Glasgow, 23 November 2024 – 30 March 2025. Photo: Keith Hunter.