Danielle Dean: The Alien Invasion of Hemel Hempstead
The artist talks about her new sci-fi-inspired film and technicolour watercolours at Frieze, which draws on her own experience of growing up biracial in the Home Counties
The artist talks about her new sci-fi-inspired film and technicolour watercolours at Frieze, which draws on her own experience of growing up biracial in the Home Counties
Danielle Dean proposes ‘a more working-class way of encountering artworks’, transforming 47 Canal’s stand at Frieze London into a space akin to an antique shop.
Dean’s latest body of work explores the complex social fabric of her hometown of Hemel Hempstead, a postwar ‘new town’ development, with a utopian vision of housing white working-class Londoners made homeless and displaced by the Blitz. Dean explains that growing up in Hemel Hempstead as half-Nigerian, half-British was not a ‘streamlined’ experience.
She discusses Middle England's ‘fearful relationship to colour’ and her film Hemel (2024), where ‘the other’ is a B-movie-, sci-fi-inspired slime that spreads through the streets. In her accompanying large-scale works on paper, she experiments with a Turkish marbling technique, creating pools of vibrant colour that threaten to overwhelm black-and-white watercolours of the town. Drawn directly into the black ink, Dean’s faces are ‘ghosts’ of slavery haunting a nostalgic vision of smalltown England.
Danielle Dean is presented by 47 Canal at Frieze London (A15).
Further Information
Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, The Regent’s Park.
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