On the occasion of her solo exhibition, LADYLIKE, at NADA New York with Superposition Gallery, Haleigh Nickerson spoke with curator and writer Jane’a Johnson for Elephant Magazine.
Jane’a Johnson: You’ve been really, really busy. You’ve been running around all week, basically.
Haleigh Nickerson: I have been running around all week, but I think it’s a good energy to be on because I’m finally back in this faster pace, or adjusting back to a faster pace. You kind of have to be that fast for art. I feel like I’m getting back into things. All around, I’m in a good place.
JJ: For you, with LADYLIKE in particular, how was it actually showing that, focusing more on objects, in this case, boomboxes?
HN: I feel like it’s been powerful to see the work all together in this specific context of objecthood in relationship to Blackness, Black culture, Black womanhood, and my own girlhood—and also in terms of hip-hop, because I love hip-hop. Location-wise, it’s interesting too, because I’m LA-based. The West Coast, and West Coast hip-hop and all these different things inform the work, so it’s interesting for it to be shown in New York, the origin place of rap music. That’s pretty cool. I just feel really grateful to have been able to show alongside so many other great artists and to meet so many other Black artists and creatives who are making amazing work too.
JJ: First of all, congratulations. When I first saw it, I was so happy, and hyped, and super geeked. Because whenever I interact with your work, I always see myself and a generation of women reflected, especially with LADYLIKE. If I were a little girl, and I could have imagined how I wanted a sculpture to look in my room, that would be it, and those would be the objects—the barrettes, the knockers, the bamboo earrings. I wonder: what’s your process like?
HN: Connecting to my girl-self. That’s my intention. Connecting to my inner child, the younger me, or my Black girl-self. I use these different objects and symbols in my current world to piece together my past Black girl universe. To answer your question, they feel kind of meditative when I make them, not just in terms of piecing together the found objects. It feels very meditative, as if I’m creating a rhythm with the repetition of compiling all these different pieces together. But it’s also about deconstructing objects and reconstructing them in imaginative and playful ways. There’s also, again, that essence of me tapping into that part of my Black girlhood. It’s a kind of piecing together of all these scattered pieces and parts, like what you do when you’re a kid, accumulating and repeating different shapes and objects. I’m also really thinking about memory, and the objects that I play around with are connected to aspects of my own identity and how I understand my connection to Blackness. There are hairclips and a lot of other objects from the beauty supply store.
JJ: That’s what I love. There are all these hairclips, all these knockers—it takes me back.
HN: One of my intentions is for the work to feel nostalgic. The process itself feels like a trip to the beauty supply store. It’s heaps of clips and bobos, rubber bands, beads to put on your braids, and actual synthetic hair. There are jewellery charms and chains, and Cuban links. All these different objects are imprinted in my memories of how I remember growing up as a Black girl.
JJ: I remember when we first met on Zoom, we were all over the place talking about Black girlhood and archives—
HN: Oh! I’m so fascinated by archives. I feel like my use of objects is in line with an archive. It’s a culturally-specific connection to the object. There’s also a part where I’m trying to preserve the object in my own way.
JJ: It’s creating its own archive in a way, recontextualising all of these things that we know and love, that we all have in our memory, and preserving them, making a single object that we can hold and have that is out of these Black girl memories. When we were first talking, I told you how much your work reminds me of Theaster Gates; it’s world building, it’s social praxis. It’s not just making something, it’s inviting someone into a world.
HN: My goal is to keep building my Black girl universe out of my own lexicon of objects—I guess it is my archive!
JJ: It is! I feel like there’s a tension when you look at these boomboxes because it’s girly and it’s beautiful, but there are also these chains, this metal, the knockers look solid. There’s femininity but strength.
HN: Each piece feels feminine, but it also has this heaviness. The accumulation of the bobos, the repetition of the bamboo, does kind of feel like armour. I’m kind of trying to create this protective layer, not just in terms of the work, but in terms of when you’re thinking of being a Black girlhood, or just being a woman in general. We have to have layers of protection to us. That’s a part of our femininity. There is a hardness to our femininity.
JJ: That’s our kind of femininity. It is encased in something. Not everybody always has access to that softness on the inside. It’s a very specific way of being feminine in the world.
HN: My work is really inspired by female voices in rap and hip-hop music. Despite the space being so male-dominated and misogynistic, it still speaks to femininity in different ways, to having to protect yourself and wear your armour, and the conversations around strength and Black womanhood, always feeling like you have to be strong. It definitely resonates with my idea of femininity.
JJ: Your work for the last decade draws on popular culture and hip-hop. How has it fed into your work?
HN: Growing up as a Black girl in the 90s was such a specific thing. We all have our cultural pinpoints, but I was so influenced by pop culture and pop cultural icons. The reason I keep referencing and drawing from these things as an archive is that I feel like it did help me piece together my own sense of identity. In Hip-Hop Divas, this anthology of Black female rappers, there’s a part where Hilton Als is talking about Missy Elliot, about how she’s a representation of the “new negro”—essentially a compilation or piecing of fragmented and scattered parts. Missy has taken what she’s been given and transformed it into something powerful, miraculous, and otherworldly. I feel like that process is the process through which I have been able to understand and build my identity. I do think that, in terms of pop culture, I have been putting things together: flipping through hair magazines, CD jacket covers, records, hip-hop magazines, fashion images—all these things that were at my fingertips. I feel like they are pieces of me.
JJ: Your work is influenced by hip-hop. You have this physical representation in objects, but also a hip-hop way of thinking, because hip-hop is predicated on the sample.
HN: I’m not literally opening Pro Tools, but my process does feel like I’m sampling. I’m taking from here, I’m building off that, I’m making repetitive sequences to build out this world.
JJ: Your objects are informed by Black womanhood, but something very specific to us and very important to us: our hair.
HN: For Black women, hair is so loaded, but I feel like, at least for me, going to the hair shop with my mother and my sister was one of those memories that I’ll remember forever. It was one of those consistent things that helped me connect to my Blackness, helped me understand who I was, and helped me feel proud of being a Black girl. The process for all my work starts with hair—not just hair in terms of the politics of it, but also the power in the styling and the imaginative exploration of hair. Hair is such a vast world.
JJ: Even with your racket works, not only is the work great as a standalone piece, but it makes me focus on what hair means to us. Were those inspired by Venus and Serena Williams?
HN: In the book Their Eyes Were Watching God, I always loved how there was a consistent metaphor about how hair was this representation of power and strength, not just beauty. Yes, the racket works were inspired by the Williams sisters. Growing up, they were my superheroes. Everybody has the person they think is a rockstar—those are mine. I grew up playing sports and their hair was this representation that I could really connect to.
JJ: You mentioned that it’s not just about beauty, it’s about power. Those are two extremely powerful, self-confident women, and they’re also physically strong. They’re playing this sport in a way that’s quite different from the women before them.
HN: Yes. Then to think about their power, not just of their hair and the way that they look, but their juxtaposition against this whiteness.
JJ: That work is so interesting. You get all of that just from seeing a single racket with hair and beads.
HN: When you think about tennis, you’re not thinking about two girls from Compton. You’re not thinking about their mother putting packs of beads on their hair. What fascinates me and what I love the most about that work and about being in that headspace is thinking about how heavy it is not just to dominate in tennis, but to dominate with this heaviness of beads clanking. Of course, it’s a part of the styling and the look, but that’s powerful too.
JJ: It’s interesting as a metaphor; it’s physically heavy to play like that, but there is also the heaviness of the expectations that were placed on them. The object really represents that. I know you were previously focused on making installations and on photography, but you’re now making more objects. How have you evolved?
HN: When I started, I was doing a lot of different things simultaneously. I was doing self-portrait photography and building worlds around characters—worlds which eventually became installations. They were shifting spaces of identity, and they still had themes of hair and beauty and self-representation and Blackness. It was really me teasing out and exploring my own Blackness. The basis of my installations is that there is intentional overabundance, this accumulation and this messiness, this piecing together of many different things in a different way. I would merge photography and sometimes video works and objects. Now I’m in a place where I’m interested in isolating specific objects and trying to connect with them.
JJ: What’s next for you?
HN: Expanding the racket works. I love those works! I feel like a kid in a candy store when I’m making them. I’m still fixated on Black womanhood and exploring my identity through these pop cultural and historical icons. It doesn’t have to be a literal portrait. That’s what excites me the most about the racket works; even though they’re just objects, they’re able to evoke the process of unravelling Black female identity.
JJ: Is there anything else you want to add? You and I, we’re always all over the place.
HN: But there’s a method to it! I feel like I get that a lot—and maybe that’s what I want to say—that I’m all over the place, but there’s a method to the madness, you’ll see.
Written by Jane’a Johnson
