Saturday, August 25, 2007

AFRIKAN



This is something I created to evoke the suffering of the African people - Poverty, Hunger, Genocide, Child Slavery, Human Trafficking, AIDS, Torture, etc.

Created using coffee, nails, acrylic paint, and an Ethiopian coffee sack.

It took me over a month to put this together, and the final stages, on my knees in the hot sun weaving the sheet of canvas into the sack, threading the rusty nails into the weave, were cathartic as I imagined bare shoulders in the heat of the African sun, bare feet on a wet loading dock, black weathered hands loading heavy sacks full of coffee beans into the ships hold for travel to American warehouses...and I felt connected to their sufferings, like walking into a spider's web and discovering an invisible world, a hidden connection between us all...
kg

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That is really cool Keith! It does indeed present a sense of suffering. Kind of has a dark sort of feel to it. What are you going to do with it?