“Most of my work focuses on labour – the thought of how Black girls had been navigating this area that was devoted particularly for the thought of Black folks being right here to work, to not take pleasure in themselves,” De Dier says. However her collages additionally contain going past this premise, a chance to think about areas and actions of leisure which probably passed off, however had been by no means documented and preserved: “Relaxation, enjoyment, and having an area of your personal,” she says. In her 2018 solo present El Canto de Amelia [Amelia’s Song] at Panama’s Allegro Gallery, De Dier cloaked her topics in trendy clothes, utilizing visible anachronism as a speculative software – denim jackets as markers of subculture and self-expression which had been absent from the authentic, extra ethnographic pictures.
“I used to be creating collages that had been attempting to know what this surviving – and dwelling – may have seemed like, past what was being proven in these archives,” she explains. She attracts inspiration from her nice grandmother, who moved from Barbados to Panama between 1905 and 1908, following her husband who labored on the canal. She purchased a home and made a house for herself regardless of a hostile reception, De Dier tells me. The artist is reluctant to make use of the time period ‘resilience,’ however fortitude is a serious theme of her work, in addition to concepts of self-expression. On this sense, she takes inspiration from artists Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson, but in addition the likes of Kerry James Marshall and Wangechi Mutu, who use portray to fictionalise components of Black group.
