Ferocious Grace, An Exhibition

Ferocious Grace

Usha dapur Kar is a contemporary visual artist based in Oxford who creates mixed media installations and paintings to stimulate reflection and conversation about social justice. Combining precisely painted elements with animistic energetic flow, she links the specific to the universal. Beauty and challenge are at the essence of her practice as she explores the creative chaos of what it is to be human.

This autumn at the Kendrew Barn Usha presents Ferocious Grace - an installation of 31 paintings exploring the processes and impacts of institutional racism in the workplace. Simultaneously lyrical and powerful, this work considers the dissonance experienced when racism occurs within the not-for-profit sector which frequently articulates a strongly anti-racist self-image. Reflection on events in her recent work experience led Usha to interrogate, reconsider and reinterpret much of her previous working life in the sector - indeed, to revisit relationships outside of the workplace. Usha deploys repeated motifs including use of the colour orange and the image of a canary to centre the “problem” woman of colour, connecting disparate images across the gallery – she draws on her personal experience to consider much wider challenges.

While narrating painful experiences and complex emotions, Ferocious Grace signals the immense inner strength required to survive and flourish in the face of racism. The embedded myth of endless resilience. Ultimately, this work is about touching the bottom, learning – in the healing darkness – to be resourceful, grow, to draw on the gifts of ancestry and self-knowledge, until, eventually, new light flows in.

About Usha

A Londoner by birth, I grew up on the margins of the city, braving the verges of the speeding North Circular to walk with our mother among the shady oaks and beeches of Epping Forest, browsing in the longest street market in Europe where sarsaparilla was drunk

by the murky glassful standing at the stall, tanks of live eels awaited their speedy execution and a Knickerbocker Glory in the Wimpy was a longed-for treat.

At home, along with chips, cheese and Angel Delight we ate dal and mango and snacked on chevda - foods we were mocked for if they appeared in our lunchboxes. From age 4 I followed my father’s life long vegetarianism at a time when it was notable.

I referred to myself back then as “half caste”, knowing no different. We were the only mixed-race family we knew of in Walthamstow at that time and grew up on a highly visible island in a sea of divisive local and national politics.

It is perhaps no coincidence that I later followed a career in the international humanitarian aid and community development sectors that led me here, to Oxford.  And that I chose to live in multi-racial, multi-cultural, mixed social class East Oxford, where, as a single parent, I have raised my daughter, in this small vibrant city of strong, often disturbing, contrasts.

I came to art later in life, and unearthed a prism through which to gain clarity, analyse and communicate in ways that embrace beauty, are succinct and impactful and celebrate resilience and tenacity. With Ferocious Grace I have mobilised a wide range of experience to take back voice and to accompany my peers. With this piece I articulate a focused view of how it can feel working in a sector that often struggles to show courage and recognise itself as part of the system.