Danielle Dean and Dan Guthrie’s Filmic Counter-Narratives

In the introduction to Black Film, British Cinema (1988), a publication produced after a landmark conference held at London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, theorist Kobena Mercer noted that the ‘sophisticated defence of the ethnicity of Englishness developed by intellectuals of the new right demonstrates that the understanding and representation of British history is now a crucial site of cultural contestation’. Nearly 40 years on, Spike Island’s simultaneous solo exhibitions by artists Danielle Dean and Dan Guthrie explore, in the words of the exhibition literature, the ‘representations and (mis)representations’ of contemporary Black British life. 

Guthrie’s show, ‘Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure’, consists of two single-channel videos exploring the present and potential futures of the Blackboy Clock, which comprises a statue of a Black boy with large red lips dressed in a gold leaf skirt, holding a club to strike the hour. The jacquemart timepiece, which dates from the late 18th century, is an example of historical blackamoor iconography and, located in Guthrie’s hometown of Stroud in Gloucestershire, was a local landmark the artist used to walk past regularly. In 2021, a task force was assembled to consider removing the figure from view, with the local council report concluding that, ‘without a doubt, the boy’s image came [...] through the influence of slavery and colonialism’. In Empty Alcove (2025), the artist uses a digital clone tool to erase the jacquemart from view, presenting instead an image of the building with an empty facade. Overlayed on the footage of this scene are subtitles: red text denoting subjective narrative of what is seen and heard on screen, such as ‘[mundanity blossoms]’; white text narrating factual information, such as bird song and the sounds of schoolchildren playing. The film’s strength lies in its aesthetic simplicity. Yet, Guthrie projects a future that many would object to, given statements by former Conservative MP for Stroud, Siobhan Baillie, who suggested that the removal of the jacquemart would mean the ‘erasure’ of history, while heritage body Historic England was quoted in a 2022 BBC News report as stating that such a move would ‘harm both the significance of the listed building […] and the character of the conservation area’.

In Rotting Figure (2025), Guthrie considers the jacquemart’s fate once it is removed. Many local respondents to a public consultation on the clock felt the best place for the figure was a local museum – a move similar to that of the statue of wealthy merchant trader Edward Colston, which was originally located in Bristol city centre, a short distance from Spike Island. Colston’s involvement with the sale of almost 100,000 enslaved West African people in the late 17th century led to his statue being pulled down by activists and campaigners during the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the globe in 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd. Its removal instigated national debate about the politics of the remembrance and memorialization of Britain’s imperial past, with the Grade II listed statue now contextualised and permanently on view in nearby institution M-Shed. Rotting Figure visualizes what Guthrie believes should happen to the clock in Stroud, in what the artist calls a process of ‘radical un-conservation’: the figure should be left to its ruin. Depicting the statue in a constructed black box with little natural light, Guthrie uses CGI to render the jacquemart covered with a black cloth standing on a black plinth. Slowly but surely, it crumbles, until the film’s end, where, with creaks and groans, the figure finally turns to rubble. Guthrie’s speculative futures are an important antidote in an age of vitriolic debate about Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and the visibility and treatment of ethnic minorities in British society. By proposing the statue’s destruction, Guthrie suggests that devoting money and resources to managing its conservation would continue to reinforce its relevance and historical importance; it would be better to simply let it rot. Further, in its rendering of racial politics outside of large cities, Rotting Figure asserts that the Black presence in rural British settings is a perspective which should be made visible. 

The visual representation of Britishness in an age of populism is still contested territory

Dean’s concurrent show, ‘This Could All Be Yours!’, centres on her 16mm film Hemel (2024), where nothing is quite as it seems. The artist brings together a cast of family and community members to depict Black British life outside of London in her hometown of Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. Dean’s film is inspired by the sci-fi Quatermass 2 (1957), where mysterious non-human forms and toxic black slime threaten a community. Scenes from Quatermass 2 were shot in Hemel Hempstead and Dean uses the film’s alien-invasion metaphor to consider race and migration in post-Brexit Britain. One protagonist in Hemel, Stan, is a Nigerian migrant who works at the local Amazon warehouse, having moved to Hemel Hempstead after his wife was recruited to work in a care home. Stan powerfully recounts how work colleagues refuse to stand in the lift at the same time as him, wary of his presence. A group of young Black schoolchildren from the town discuss being the recipients of hostile stares and questions about the colour of their skin. These recollections dovetail with Dean’s own experiences of racism: in one powerful scene, the artist discusses her youth with her white mother, who is surprised to discover that Dean suffered racist abuse as a schoolgirl. These narratives are at odds with the utopian vision that guided the postwar development of several ‘new towns’ in Britain, including an area of Hemel Hempstead, whose motto was ‘Greater, Richer, More Beautiful’. Footage from the British Pathé archives woven throughout the film documents a tranquil town, where mothers happily push prams with young babies, far from the present-day reality of grey, dreary architecture that Dean depicts with precision. By stepping away from a faithful documentary approach, blurring fact and fiction, Hemel rewards multiple viewings. Presented alongside the film are a series of watercolour illustrations, combining archival imagery of the town with familiar sights such as Topshop, a now-closed department store, estate agent signs and kebab shops. What is made clear in Dean’s rendering of her childhood experiences, as well as those of the other protagonists, is the insidious combination of racism and alienation.

Last summer, weeks after the anti-immigration party Reform UK gained five seats in British parliament, riots instigated by the far-right broke out in towns and cities across the country. Powerful representations of Black British life still cause outrage and offence: both Guthrie and Dean were recipients of angry responses to their intention to explore this subject through film; in Guthrie’s case, the artist also received threats that far-right political groups would come to their doorstep. The visual representation of Britishness in an age of populism is still contested territory. As I write, the leader of the Conservative party, Kemi Badenoch, declared at a conference that ‘some cultures are better than others’ with the potential for ‘our country and Western civilization to be lost’ in the wake of ‘left-wing progressivism’ and immigration. In this powerful dual presentation, Dean and Guthrie’s filmic counter-narratives act as correctives in an age of misinformation and regressive discriminatory debate about race and nationality in contemporary Britain.

Danielle Dean’s ‘This could all be yours!’ and Dan Guthrie’s ‘Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure’ are on view at Spike Island, Bristol, until 11 May

^{Main image: Danielle Dean, Hemel (detail), 2024, production still. Courtesy: the artist and 47 Canal, New York}