Paula Mans
Washington, DC
Website
paulamans.art
Social Media
Instagram
How would you describe your work?
I seek to tell the many stories of the global Black experience through collage. I view collage as emblematic of the cultural and historical interconnectedness of the African Diaspora. Just as the dispersed people of the Diaspora are tied together by the common thread of ancestry, disjointed pieces are fused together to communicate one story in collage. In my work, I draw from images of people from across the African Diaspora - deconstructing, bonding, and resignifying small parts to assemble new faces and forms that communicate identity and shared experiences. While collage is traditionally a two-dimensional medium, I insert textures, layering, and mixed-media materials into my work, lending a sculptural quality to my collages.
What inspires you?
My experiences living throughout the African Diaspora have had a profound impact upon my personal and artistic development. As a child, I lived in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Eswatini and spent the majority of my young adulthood living in Brazil. These experiences instilled in me an expansive view of Black identity - Blackness that extends beyond the myth of monolith, Blackness as a global identity that transcends cultures, languages, religion, and geographies. This worldview shapes my identity, politics, and informs my work.
In my daily life, my child is my number one inspiration. Witnessing the fearless manner with which they explore the world inspires me to look more deeply within and without. I am also inspired by literature. I am an avid reader and my personal library is housed in my studio space. I often read poetry and prose while working in the studio because I find that reading ignites my imagination and curiosity. The words of authors such as Rivers Solomon, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks often weave their way into my work. In many ways, I view my pieces as visual narratives inspired by the aforementioned authors’ masterful storytelling.
Can you speak about your process?
I begin my process by collecting found images of Black people from all over the globe. I tend to gravitate towards faces with strong gazes. Once I’ve collected imagery, I then begin to deconstruct and dissect bodies, bringing together various features from two or three different people to reconstruct singular figures. I always begin my process by constructing faces. In my practice, the emotive quality of facial expressions determines the messages that I choose to convey when I go on to build the rest of the figure’s body.
I tend to create my collaged figures off of the surface, taking time to focus on forming visual harmony. Once the figures are constructed in their entirety, they take on an energy that determines the rest of the creative process. I often live with them for weeks at a time while I fine tune their composition. I hang the figures up on the walls of my studio and let them speak. They often communicate when they are pleased or displeased with the way that they are formed. I believe that these voices are a manifestation of ancestral energy - something deeply spiritual and intuitive that exists beyond myself - guiding my hand, my eye and ultimately driving the work. Once I am satisfied with the figure, I begin to consider their placement on a surface, the colors surrounding them, and any additional symbology that I would like to explore in any given piece.
How did you become interested in art?
As a child, I was always engaged in some form of creative work. I sang, performed, played instruments, and drew quite a lot. My childhood home was full of art - sculptures, paintings, and tapestries that my parents brought home from our family’s travels abroad and prints from African-American artists such as Romare Bearden and Henry Ossawa Tanner. In retrospect, I realize that art has always been around me and inside of me since birth. In High School, I took an art class that was highly technical and largely drawing based. Learning about and making art in that rigid context pushed me away from creating. I believed that I didn’t possess the facility or technical skill to be an artist. As a result of that experience, I stopped creating art completely from my late teens until I had my child at age 30.
When COVID quarantines began in 2020, I turned to abstract painting as a means to express the chaos governing the world around me and the turmoil I was experiencing within me. I created a series of deeply introspective large scale, textured, acrylic pieces on the deck in my backyard that I called emotional landscapes. Gradually, I turned to a mixed-media approach to my abstraction, infusing paper-based materials to create layers and emphasize textures. Although the state-sanctioned killings of Black people at the hands of the police is something that African-American people are painfully and intimately aware of across generations, witnessing the graphic videos of George Floyd’s murder and photographs of Breonna Taylor go viral in 2020 greatly impacted me politically and artistically. Witnessing these events led me to break from abstraction and focus entirely on creating figurative work. While the state-sanctioned murders signified a literal disappearing and maiming of Black lives, voices, and bodies, the viral videos and images represented the hypervisibility of Blackness within social media and societal spaces. Both processes, however, contributed to the dehumanization of Black people and an eradication of their power and free will. I began to examine this tension by creating figurative collage work, collecting found images of Black people - deconstructing and reconstructing portraiture to amplify the agency of the Black figure.
Do you have any favorite artists, movies, books or quotes?
Some of my favorite artists include: Zanele Muholi, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Simone Leigh, and Charles White. I admire the bold, innovative ways in which they utilize portraiture as a tool to center the multiplicity of Blackness in their work. These artists demonstrate great care, sensitivity, audacity, and a love for Black people and experiences through their visual activism.
Some of my favorite books include: The Deep (Rivers Solomon), Who Fears Death (Nnedi Okarafor), Butter Honey Pig Bread (Francesca Ekwuyasi), Girl, Woman, Other (Bernandine Evaristo), and Mama Day (Gloria Naylor). I am particularly drawn to afrofuturistic speculative fiction because of the ways that it renders Black people as protagonists in the inventing, creating, and revolutionizing of the past, present, and future.
The following quotes encapsulate the philosophy that drives my creative work and the way that I view my role as artist-activist:
“Africa, like Osiris, has been torn into pieces and scattered over the earth. We must put it back together.” (Joseph Ki Zerbo)
“I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.” (Toni Morrison)
What advice do you have for younger artists? (optional)
My advice for younger artists is that it is never too late to pursue your passion. There is so much pressure on young people to know what and who they want to be so early in life. My own winding journey back towards art is proof that it is never too late to find yourself and your calling. Live your life, make mistakes, expand from within, and then come home to yourself through your artmaking. You must live to find your artistic voice. Explore the world outside of your creative practice and all of your learning and observations will filter their way back to your art - fortifying your voice and vision.
