Nicholas Daley and his collaborator Akinola Davies Jr. discuss Daley's London exhibition
Inside Nicholas Daley’s Exhibition: “It Is My Story But It Also Reflects the Wider Black British Experience”
“As creators we have a duty to be storytellers,” says the British designer Nicholas Daley on a Zoom call. “Whether it’s me through fashion and design, or Akinola through film, we have an opportunity to shine a light on the community.” Daley is discussing “Return to Slygo,” the multimedia exhibition based around his work and story that opens today at the Now Gallery on London’s Greenwich Peninsula. Pandemic-delayed but now good to go, the show unpacks the lineage from which Daley has crafted his in-fashion-enunciation of a Black British experience that is simultaneously uniquely his and adjacent to myriad others across this nation’s post-colonially shaped ethnic kaleidoscope.
Alongside pieces from his collections, the exhibition unpacks the fabric of the relationship from which Daley sprung. His Dundee, Scotland-born mother Maureen and Jamaica-born father Jeffrey together ran a pioneering night called The Reggae Klub in Edinburgh between 1978 and 1982. A promotional t-shirt worn by Jeffrey—aka I-man Slygo—when on door, decks, and chef duties at the club night has become the basis of a key Daley piece. Meanwhile Maureen’s family background in the Dundee weaving trade is reflected both in the jute and other local materials—including pieces knitted by Maureen herself—in the collections, as well as in the materials on show in Greenwich.
In addition to the physical installations Daley approached the filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr. to create a film also named Return to Slygo, that reflects in moving image what Daley describes as “the soul of the exhibition.” Contributors to the project include Aswad’s Dennis Bovell (on music direction), Sons of Kemet (in performance), and Roger Robinson (on spoken word). While an online preview is no substitute for seeing an exhibition in the flesh, Daley and Davies Jr. were kind enough to shed some more light on their excellent-sounding collaboration. Here is some of what they had to say.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Luke Leitch
