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Flannery O’kafka – For Willy Love and Booker T: Blue babies do whatever they want

When Flannery O’kafka learned that the shop front space that houses Sierra Metro gallery used to be a carpet shop, something clicked with her ongoing ideas for her proposed Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition. The result is For Willy Love and Booker T; Blue babies do whatever they want. O’kafka’s show mixes photography and film installation as part of a continuum of a deeply personal exploration of the notion of family albums, offering sanctuary and safety to adoptees like her in this most playful of spaces.

 ‘It began when a friend of mine sent me this film of her baby with a blanket on her head,’ O’kafka explains. ‘My friend sent me a message saying I’d love it, and how her baby had been doing this for twenty minutes. In the film, there's a blue carpet, and then I thought, I've always wanted to carpet a space, because there's a different feeling when you walk into a space with a different surface. The carpet in my bedroom as a child was light blue. The baby in the film is wearing all blue. The ceiling in my studio is blue. Then discovering Sierra Metro used to be a carpet shop, and was light blue, it all seemed to connect.’

 

O’kafka recorded herself singing what she calls ‘an improvised hymn’ her partner had sung to her during moments when her autism and neurodivergency led to her feeling distressed. This forms the soundtrack to the film. Other works in the exhibition include a series of riso prints featuring a photograph of a Palestinian mother holding a baby, with an angry sibling standing next to them in a show O’kafka calls ‘a remix’ of previous work. 

 

‘There's a soft defiance in the show,’ says O’kafka. ‘A space for the Motherfather to be elevated, but not in hierarchy; into a place that offers and accepts collective care and collective liberation. It's all a reclamation of doing weird stuff because we *want* to,’ she says.

 

The show’s title stems from a meeting O’kafka had several years ago with her birth mother, who, as a teenager in Ohio, had given O’kafka up for adoption. With Willy Love the name of her great grandfather, and Booker T her great uncle, these became conflated with two other babies born to other mothers in the maternity home with O’kafka’s mother. Though those babies never survived, ‘They deserved to live and to have safe soft spaces and to party a little, too’ says O’kafka.

 

While a sense of intimacy prevails in O’kafka’s work, a sense of fun prevails throughout. ‘There's a lying down space and a sitting space,’ she says. ‘And there's a gift shop.’

 

Sierra Metro, 10th August – 15thSeptember.


The List, August 2024

 

 ends

 

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