Decolonising the National Art Collection

Morfudd Bevan, Art Curator, National Library of Wales

29 August 2024 | Minute read

Last year the National Library of Wales commissioned four artists of colour: Joshua Donkor, Jasmine Violet, Mfikela Jean Samuel and Dr Adéọlá Dewis to create works of art in response to the Library’s collections.

These art commissions were funded by the Welsh Government, as part of the Anti-racist Wales Action Plan.

Joshua Donkor’s portrait of Eric Ngalle Charles

Oil painting of a portrait of a black man sitting at a table. Other imagery of black communities surround him.

The National Library of Wales is home to a substantial collection of over 10,000 portraits, celebrating notable figures in Wales and Welsh history, but very few of the portraits celebrate people of colour who have played a central role in the development of Wales. This led to intense discussions between the Library and the accomplished portraitist Joshua Donkor, who in turn received guidance regarding the project from the Sub-Sahara Advisory panel. The SSAP was formed in 2009, to support and celebrate African communities across Wales and in Africa. The name of the poet, playwright and author Eric Ngalle Charles came to light quickly as a figure who should be represented within our national portrait collection. His portrait is a significant addition to the Library’s art collection, and is a small step forward in the crucial improvements which need to be implemented, in order to develop the Library’s collections.

Eric Ngalle Charles

Eric Ngalle Charles was born in Buea, Cameroon, but in 1997 at the age of 17 he became a victim of human trafficking. By 21 years of age, he had finally found a new home in Wales, where he states he re-found his name, voice, and identity. His journey was recounted in his emotive 2019 autobiography ‘I Eric Ngalle’. Today, he is celebrated as one of Wales’s foremost cultural figures and works with other refugees, helping them find their voices and redact their stories. In 2017, the Arts Council of Wales awarded him a Creative Wales Fellowship for his work on Migration, Memory, language, and trauma. He has published and edited many works that often reflect upon his experiences, including his most recent work, ‘Homeland’, published in 2022. He is currently a PhD researcher at King's College London.

Joshua Donkor

Joshua Donkor is a Ghanian-British painter who graduated from Cardiff Metropolitan School of Art and Design in 2020 and whose work uses portraiture as a tool to subvert monolithic portrayals of Black identity. His portraits include layered visual references created through various painting, printing, and layering techniques which give a great sense of depth and meaning to his work. As in all of Joshua’s works, the portrait of Eric Ngalle was the result of an intense collaborative process between artist and sitter. In this portrait notable photographs and significant books to the sitter’s life are powerfully integrated into the work.

Joshua Donkor stated:

‘The clarity of memory has significance. You can listen to the conversation through the paintings and trace the stories through the person’s life. The aim of the portrait was to create an archive of Eric’s life and influence within Wales and Welsh literature. Immortalising some of Eric’s incredible story, from his journey to Wales and his rise as a successful author, poet and playwright, creating bridges between communities and countries through his work.

Being able to speak with Eric was a true blessing, he is a natural born storyteller and one of the most captivating people I’ve had the pleasure of painting. To be trusted to tell some of Eric’s incredible story has been such a privilege! And to have my work becoming a part of such a historical institution is a real honour.’

Eric Ngalle Charles stated: ‘I was apprehensive, but Joshua's demeanour put me at ease. By the end, it felt like I had known him all my life. It felt great to sit with a Bendigedig artist’.

Adéọlá Dewis’ HorseHead

Two horse skulls face each other, almost in a ying and yang way, the one on the left is draped in white cloth with bells and red and green ribbon. The one on the right is draped in black cloth and red ribbon. Both hold cardboard signs that say 'Permission

Adéọlá Dewis is an artist and researcher from Trinidad and Tobago, based in Wales since 2003. She graduated in Visual Arts from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine in 2000, followed by an MA in Fine Arts at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff and a PhD in Critical and Cultural theory (part funded by a Reconstructing Multiculturalism scholarship) at Cardiff University. She is a Diaspora artist with a keen interest in ritual, folk and indigenous cultural performances. Her practice involves drawing, painting, performance and writing and is particularly drawn to performances of transformation as seen in Carnivals and masquerades, as well as the making of sacred spaces.

For the commissioned work, the artist explored the connections between Welsh and Caribbean culture through masquerade traditions. She focused on the Fari Lwyd tradition, and the Horeshead masquerade of Jamaica’s Jonkonnu. The artist drew inspiration from items in the National Library’s collections, which included film footage from the Library's ITV Wales Archive, documenting a celebration of the Fari Lwyd tradition in Tregaron in 1964. She also reflected on an image taken by the photo-journalist Geoff Charles from the Library's national photographic collection, portraying children carrying the Fari Lwyd in Aberystwyth in the 1950s. Much of her research was also based on Dr Rhiannon Ifans’ 2022 publication, ‘Stars and Ribbons: Winter Wassailing in Wales’, and John Nunley and Judith Bettelheim’s 1988 publication, ‘Caribbean Festival Arts’.

Open sketchbook and pen resting on larger paper.

She used herself as the model for the work combining photography and paint. The diptych she stated drew on parallels between the two traditions of the Fari Lwyd and the Jonkonnu, whilst also referencing the Horesehead masquerade in the Mande country of Mali, West Africa. The work played on the juxtaposition of the traditions and objects - referencing femininity, celebration, darkness and light, transformation, joy, reflection, ritual, life and death. The artist also referenced her hiraeth / longing for Trinidad and Tobago in her work.

She stated: ‘Christmastime traditions, masquerades and carnivals have always fascinated me. My growing up experiences in Trinidad and exposure to Carnival informed an appreciation for the capacities of folk festivals, carnivals and masquerades, to nurture and build community identity through public celebratory enactments that utilise masking, music and movement. The significance of y Fari Lwyd performance aesthetics, for me, lies within the ways in which these folk traditions of transformation reclaim collective joy, linking people and culture – affirming a need to masquerade as a way of celebrating life in an increasingly polarised world’.

These are two of the four projects that form part of our Decolonising Art initiative. The two other commissioned works by the artists Mfikela Jean Samuel and Jasmine Violet grew from items in the Library's national map collection, and had a particular focus on difficult and contested histories of slavery and colonialism. You can read about these commissions in the article Maps, art and decolonisation by the National Library's Assistant Map Curator, Ellie King.