The clown was a safe haven. Shedding her, letting her go in her wholeness was painful but necessary. What was once a liberated figure, something that had grown out of my personal turbulent relationship, whilst I studied how Joshua Reynolds’ painting haunted me long after seeing it in real time, its ghostly apparition followed me so I decided to invert it. Mock its colonial gaze. That's who the clown was to me, a serious yet light‑hearted woman that had the courage to bounce back the gaze.
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I was asked to “just focus on the work,” my art practice — but who does that benefit? It’s like being told to conduct research in a contaminated lab and then pretend the contamination has no effect on the results.
The “contamination” in my case is epistemic erasure, epistemic sabotage, constraint, classed and racialised power that shaped the conditions in which the research took place. I had to endure these pressures, the conditions are material. They have been worked with.
That instruction is not neutral. It’s a demand that pretends the conditions of production don’t matter, when in fact they shape the work at every level. It asks me to detach my practice from the structures that attempted to overwrite it — to behave as though the harm, the constraint, the labour of navigating erasure were irrelevant to the knowledge produced.
And if the shaping had been personal — say, economic restrictions that led to inventive creation — I don’t believe I would have been given the same instruction. When the conditions are classed, racialised, or structurally produced by the institution, suddenly they must be ignored. When they are institutionally inconvenient, suddenly they must be rendered immaterial. But these conditions are part of the methodology. They entered the work. They shaped its emergence. To pretend otherwise is to reproduce the very violence that tried to silence it.
Clown White, outside intervention 2016-2017 Photograhed by Valerija Zukova
I thought I could take this inversion further in my PhD studies, make whiteness absurd and undermine it's nautrality. But the figure was misconstrued, seen as a theatrical presence. There’s no theatre here. That refusal didn’t align with this supervisor’s “cross‑disciplinary” agenda. In that moment I felt what Breny Mendoza names as epistemic sabotage — the institutional distortion of a knowledge practice because it simply did not align with dominant notions of knowledge or with his perspective. And because socially my body did not hold the same value — not male, not middle‑class — as well as the uneven power dynamics 'lecturer/student', my voice could be overwritten and most often than not it was. In essays, even when I am describing my own experience, it was treated as something that could be changed, added to etc, and I am not talking about grammar or spelling. Knowledge held in a “non‑desirable body,” a working‑class body with a thick accent, becomes easier to dismiss, easier to misframe, easier to treat as empty. What Paulo Freire critiques as being deemed void by the “cleric teacher”: the assumption that some bodies arrive already full of knowledge while others arrive as vessels to awaiting supposits.
The clown was methodological. And rather than let him distort this figure into something only he could recognise, I gave her back to the sea, to the river, the water‑to‑vapour‑water alchemy, it was time to let as painful as it was and what was left with I continued to develop and work with.
I said, no. That was my biggest triumphant, my biggest decolonial, feminist move. The project was precariously developed, with that “no” standing firm, whilst I evolved on my own terms.
