Bertha and Surgery

The new exhibition by artist Maud Sulter in Glasgow contains a piece with Brontë-related echoes:

Maud Sulter - You are my kindred spirit

Tramway, Glasgow

23rd Nov 2024 - 30th Mar 2025

An immersive exhibition by the Scottish-Ghanaian poet, artist, photographer, writer, curator, gallerist and publisher Maud Sulter (1960 – 2008). Curated in collaboration with the Maud Sulter Estate, You are my kindred spirit showcases the artist's rarely exhibited moving image and spoken word archives. 

Sulter’s art testifies to her restless experimentation with a wide range of media. When working on a project she would consider its realisation in a number of presentational forms, including photography, film, text and spoken word performances of her poetry. This exhibition explores the interdisciplinary aspects of Sulter’s wider practice, including her entire film archive and soundscapes created for her installations.

Born in the Gorbals, close to Tramway, Maud Sulter began her career as a writer and award-winning poet, expanding her practice to include photography and visual art. Sulter’s expansive, multi-faceted practice sought to claim space for Black Artists and address the erasure and representation of Black Women in the histories of art, the media, and photography.  

Maud Sulter described herself as Glaswegian Ghanaian and used the Scots vernacular to explore themes of family, diaspora, history, story, and memoir. No Oxbridge Spires (1998) features Maud videoing her family walking in Glasgow’s Gorbals, whilst My Father’s House (1996) documents Sulter’s father’s funeral rites in Ghana. Sulter constantly returned to her family album to retrieve both happy and disquieting memories of growing up in Scotland, included in her photo-series Memories of Childhood (1993), and her suite of poems of the same title. The exhibition also features archival photographs of Sulter’s mother Elsie, Glasgow’s last tram conductor.

Voice is central to the exhibition and Sulter's spoken word soundworks such as The Alba Sonnets (1995) and Blood Money (1994) feature the artist’s distinctive voice. We hear her relish for words, sounds, juxtapositions, Scots dialect and archaic vocabulary. Sulter also summons the voices of others, and gives voice to women whose lives have been unrecorded or marginalised.

Sulter devoted her career to forging new platforms for artists and her remarkable body of work continues to inspire as an active legacy and inheritance for artists working today. This Tramway exhibition celebrates Maud Sulter’s work as a ‘living archive’, and will feature a dynamic events programme curated by researcher and writer, Pelumi Odubanjo.

The exhibition also contains the video installation Plantation (1994):

Likewise, the installation Plantation (1994) combines prints depicting Sulter’s body, marked out for surgery, and a video splicing a graphic recording of that surgery with Robert Stevenson’s 1943 film of Jane Eyre. Her experience is to be read in some sense as the racialised and marginalised Caribbean wife of Mr Rochester, Bertha Mason – the novel’s “madwoman in the attic”. (Joe Jackson in The Conversation)

Snack Magazine interviews Claire Jackson, co-curator of the exhibition:

Alekia Will: What sorts of ideas can be conveyed through this theme of voice?

C.J.: Maud is often giving voice to others through her work. She talks about women’s lives that have been unrecorded and often imagined herself in different guises to reinscribe the legacies of black women who were erased or obscured in art history. In the film Plantation, Maud conjures the voice of Bertha Mason from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. She was presented as the madwoman in the attic, and Maud really challenged that representation and the sense that her lived experience has been erased.

Fleming Collection has some more information:

 In a similar vein, the shocking film-piece Plantation (1995) alludes to the character of Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre (1847), the original “mad woman in the attic”, an archetype of pathologised black feminine emotion to intersectional feminists (partly thanks to Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which retells her story). A voice-over musing on the character is combined with live footage of the artist having womb surgery. The film approaches body horror in its visceral detail, striking a slightly odd tonal note in relation to the rest of the show. But it forces viewers to consider the metaphorical violence of narratives around non-white female bodies, and also speaks to ideas of trauma and healing, given that the surgery in question was a pioneering form of “womb-replacement” proffered as an alternative to full hysterectomy. (Greg Thomas)