Artist Qualeasha Wood on Representation and its Impact on Identity
"Sometimes what’s beautiful is just noticing something is different"
This August, we shine the spotlight on three up-and-coming creatives — Keyana, Qualeasha Wood and Dayi Novas — who have taken their respective fields by storm.
For Philadelphia-based jacquard tapestries and tuftings artist Qualeasha Wood, representation remains at the forefront of her desire to create. “I always felt misunderstood growing up for one reason or another and had a hard time fitting into boxes,” she recalls. Growing up, Wood had the luxury of being able to visit museums as part of her school’s curriculum, but would come back unsatisfied due to the lack of Black representation in the works she’s come across.
“After a while, I started asking my mom if I could stop going on the field trips. I’d tell her that I’d seen everything and that there wasn’t anybody who looked like me in the paintings; they would only take us to see ancient African art but never anything contemporary. A lack of representation turned me away from art in my youth because I felt like I was being told by the world that I couldn’t experience something the way my peers could,” she says.
Due to her experience and can-do attitude, Wood found herself pursuing her passion for art to rectify this. “I’ve always been really stubborn and impulsive like that, admittedly when faced with the question of my future, I couldn’t imagine living a life that wasn’t what I really wanted, so I went to art school,” she explains.
Today, the artist’s works are featured in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Rennie Collection, Vancouver; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and more recently, the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery as Wood’s first European solo exhibition — titled “tl;dr”.
What inspires you to create?
I would say the women in my family are a big influence on me. My maternal grandmother bought me a computer when I was six or so. The memories and feelings I created on that computer are things that I try to recreate and reference in my work today. On my dad’s side, a lot of the women took to knitting and crocheting blankets and stuffed animals for the grandchildren.
When I grew up, I always felt split between this love for digital and technology, and this love for the craft. I spent most of my weekends as a kid playing on The Sims, building and destroying worlds, having my parents help me with art projects, or being taught how to sew and embroider by my mother.
Your recent exhibition dealt with racial, sexual, and gender themes in regard to blackness. Why is it important to showcase these underrepresented individuals using your art and how does art give back to these identities?
Being different wasn’t easy where I was from. I felt like I couldn’t be myself because of how the world saw me. Going back to those moments in museums and feeling like I didn’t matter in the world is where the real “why” of the practice comes in.
The most important thing art ever gave me was agency. I felt like I finally had control over my story and my narrative. Representation is important especially in art, because art influences and is simultaneously influenced by culture.
I didn’t learn about other queer black artists much in school because it wasn’t considered important, but I had a wealth of knowledge of people who didn’t look like me. I found out that my non-black, non-male friends could barely name artists or even basic historical figures outside of slavery and civil rights movements.
Representation matters because everybody matters. Art made by those in underrepresented groups gives a voice to those who aren’t often heard, or whose stories aren’t often told by people who look like them. It also gives power to those people because now they believe they have the power to dream outside of the life they were given.
Can you walk us through the creative process of “tl;dr”?
“tl;dr” was made physically in three months of non-stop production at the beginning of 2023. Tl;dr is an internet phrase that’s used to summarise a long rant or essay on a social media post; the title came from a point of exhaustion of trying to explain my paradoxical emotions to myself and to others.
It was a series based on understanding the idea of loss and eventually overcoming that. The loss of loved ones, the loss of normality and the loss of self. I think this was common for everyone as we moved through the pandemic. I came to terms with a lot of hard truths and it led me to live my life on autopilot. I didn’t feel human and I felt subjected to this idea of fate, that what I did or didn’t do didn’t matter. Even that felt silly to me because while I was having an identity crisis, I was having a lot of success as an artist.
My creative process typically begins with an obsession with an idea that takes on a life of its own. I go down different rabbit holes looking for something that I respond to. With “tl;dr”, I became obsessed with a feeling of rebirth and the idea of moving beyond something. So the music I listened to, the movies I watched, everything was about reinventing the idea of self. I essentially studied the idea of self-growth. And the art that was left wasn’t necessarily the product of growth, but the evidence of the process.
With the jacquard weavings, I compared systematic failures in computers to emotional and physical failures within the body. I used glitches and pixelation to show visible alterations and sometimes destruction or removal of data to correlate with the way I have to reinvent myself constantly to perform my identities. With the tuftings, I focused on the burden of being seen and the moments in girlhood where I felt the most gazed upon and distorted moments of vulnerability. In both, it’s just a matter of perspective.
Many consider art to be a form of individuality. How has the medium shaped your selfhood over the years?
I think I see myself clearly through my art. The tapestries and jacquard both grapple with the idea of being seen and the complexities around that. When I first started making the tuftings, I was told that I couldn’t use a black silhouette as an identifier for myself because it fed into racist stereotypes, but I drew myself with a black crayon a lot as a kid and I wasn’t ashamed of that. Yet we’re taught to stray away from a black image because of someone else’s decisions on when and how Black people and their bodies are depicted. Reclaiming an image with charged history and rejecting to have it behave in the ways an audience might expect has allowed me to feel more love for my inner child.
Similarly in the tapestries, I learned how to love myself through allowing myself to see myself on my own terms. I think when I first started working in jacquard, people thought it was so narcissistic for me to be working with my own image. In fact, it couldn’t be further from the truth. I was struggling with understanding the fetishisation of my body and identity while realising that left very little genuine love and care for me in the world. I felt like it was taboo to imagine what a world in which Black women were celebrated could look like. The tapestries are my fight for that celebration.
In turn, has art changed your perception of what beauty means to you?
I think I’ve learned that what’s beautiful is purely subjective. At the end of the day, you can’t please other people. If that’s your goal, you’ve already lost. I find beauty in the smallest mundane things. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how beautiful it is to sometimes have to stop and wait for something to happen because we’re so used to instant gratification now. Sometimes what’s beautiful is just noticing something is different.
Much like art, beauty encourages self-expression. Do you have a signature beauty look?
I try to keep a very light look! I keep it simple; the only things that matter to me are lipgloss and winged eyeliner. I would definitely say most people would point out my eyeliner to describe me over everything else. I gravitated towards it because eyeliner was the only makeup product I could have as a kid and so it was something I worked hard at. A decade later, I still can’t go outside without it.
What are some beauty essentials you can’t live without?
If you had asked me this a year ago, I would’ve struggled to find an answer because I was seriously lacking in self-care. Now, I try to make taking care of myself my absolute top priority. If I limited it to my top five favourite things right now, it would be: Naturium The Glow Getter Multi- Oil Hydrating Body Wash, Fenty Gloss Bomb Heat in Hot Chocolit, Sachi Skin Triple Triphala Pigmentation Corrector, Curology Sunscreen (because yes, Black women need sun protection too!) and Benefit Cosmetics They’re Real! Xtreme Precision Eye Liner.
