Maybelle Peters

The hero now looks a bit like one of those stick figures by Giacometti.

In between performances, a blues singer sits at her mirror and is visited by the spirit of her Grandmother who reminds her of stories from her youth as well as giving her the history of the blues singers.

“I don’t want to feel like it’s only me. I know it’s not only me, because there are others out there…” ‘I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow’ is a short visual essay film by artist animator, Jessica Ashman, about navigating the visual art and animation world as a black face in a white space. Using animation and recorded interviews of eight other women of colour artists, ‘I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow’ is an abstract confessional from the director herself: a visualisation of the joy, frustration, wishes and dreams of what it feels like to be a black women and a woman of colour artist, creating and existing.

Lesson in History was produced when Peters was a student at the West Surrey School of Art and Design. Having read The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton, she was inspired to make what she describes as 'the stories of black achievement and how stories had not been told.' The animated film was subsequently screened on the BBC as part of the series 10X10. It was shot on 16mm using cutouts, photography and masks.

Combining stills of historical sites in Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands with audio conversations between the artist and her mother, the film investigates and speculates on their interconnection as an expression of British and Scottish colonialism.

Animated film Black Skin White Masks was made in response to decolonial positions put forward by Frantz Fanon in his seminal works The Wretched Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952). The film was shot on 16mm using cutouts, photography and masks.

The dread is laying there, a disembodied container carried by the wake. Its reconnection to its past, present and future vibrates as it hums into and through the distance forming its own Space Time as it hears its instructions. This is how to accommodate the ricochets - how to become bionic.

"Ocean Going Figurine" is a single screen performance in which the artist records an assemblage of figurations. Screen recording software witnesses the figuring out and figuring of conversations and movements which have been pulled from a longer iterative sequence. The software used to construct the figures highlights the collaborative process.