Being an artist sort of chases you: Ani Lacy’s Medium
by THE EDITORS
January 13, 2025
image courtesy, Ani Lacy
Editor Josh Myers recently spoke with Ani Lacy, an England-based artist of African American heritage. A recent awardee of a BEPPU project residency in Kyushu, Japan, Lacy’s work focuses on the inner-connections between language, place, and memory. Lacy’s art which combined family photographs and asemic language, was featured in the Spring 2022 issue of A Gathering Together.
AGT: Tell us about your background and journey toward becoming an artist.
AL: I think, like many artists, I found that I could do nothing else. Being an artist sort of chases you. It may be difficult to look at or to see things superficially. Everything feels connected in a way, especially if you have a persistent question that you just can’t shake. I think my background has influenced me greatly. I’m African American so descended from people who were forcefully migrated and enslaved; and that memory feels very close to me because I was trafficked into foster care as a child and my experience of growing up in several orphanages and foster homes very much echoed that ancestral experience of forced migration. For me, the question of human migration became the central question of my life. I pursued art as a means of exploring that question in a deeper way.
AGT: How did you come to choose the mediums that you work with?
AL: I work with many mediums, but my obsession is clay. There is something very primal about working with earth as your primary medium. My practice very much explores the materiality of clay and its connection to place. I also oftentimes work with family photographs, my maternal great-uncle has spent his retirement as a family genealogist and has shared photographs spanning nearly 100 years of our family history. I also use photographs I’ve taken in my own lifetime, usually of place but sometimes I use fragments of images of my family or myself. I also use found images or movie stills that relate to African American history or migration in general. From those collected images I create collages that are narratives on the theme of migration. I use these collages as ceramic decals, the clay once vitrified and glazed become a permanent canvas. I like the idea of taking something that is difficult to destroy, fired clay, and marrying it with the accessibility of collaging as an art form.
AGT: One of the most interesting things about your work is the language or script that you deploy in the pieces. If you could say more about that process?
Asemic writing is essentially abstract drawing. It mimics writing in that, at first glance, it looks like any other writing system, but upon closer inspection you realize that it is indecipherable in any logical sense. I began using asemic writing in 2018 as a way to write to my late grandmother. Eventually it became part of my practice and found its way into my art because it felt like a way to communicate something that is difficult to put into words. Or perhaps those things which I lacked the requisite linguistic knowledge to express. The hope is that, because it is equally indecipherable to everyone, that anyone can approach it and understand it from the perspective of abstraction. Of course, language and migration are closely tied together. As we move around the world we encounter different languages but also different ways of being. Each language we use informs who we are when performing that language. Asemic writing ignores that linguistic barrier. It isn’t important to be able to speak or to read the same language. Some things can just be known, or understood.
Ani Lacy, Housewives on Vacation III, 2022
AGT: How do larger questions of diaspora, of nation, of history play into your practice?
Diaspora is an interesting question because how many generations does it take to separate us from diaspora status, or remnants of our ancestral homeland, and transform us into something new? That is, the question is really of ethnogenesis and indigenous identity. I do think that as African Americans we have experienced our ethnogenesis in the Americas, because of our mixed ancestry, our distinct culture and dialects, as well as the generations spent separated from our ancestral homelands. I currently live in England, which is one of my ancestral homelands. After taking a DNA test I found that my genetic ancestry is pretty evenly split between Western Europe, West and Central Africa and Indigenous North America. I still identify completely as an African American, and I don’t think having ancestors from three continents impacts that identity at all because my ethnic group, as it currently exists, experienced its genesis in America not in Africa or Europe. I sometimes feel that I am in a perpetual state of exile, because of the political status of Blackness in America we are always othered. But, having come to live in one of my many ancestral homelands I find that I don’t quite belong here either. The question of diaspora and history is a difficult one.
AGT: What do you hope my art will do in the world?
I think it’s enough to just be there. I like the idea of being active in the world and giving something of myself.
Ani Lacy, What is a Nation: Daphne and Doris, 2022
AGT: What’s next for you?
Right now I’m working on curating a show for the Fringe Arts Bath (FaB) Festival that will be open from May 23 - June 7, 2025. The festival allows for experimental work to be presented outside of galleries and there will be art all throughout Bath in different venues. My work will be exploring natural materials and their connection to place. I’ll be working with other migrant artists as well as local artists using locally sourced materials
Ani Lacy is an American artist based in England whose practice explores the intersections of migration, impermanence, belonging, and cultural memory. Having been raised as a ward of the state, her work negotiates the space between resilience and loss, reflecting the adaptability inherent in both material and cultural practices.
Working primarily with wild clay and foraged materials, Lacy draws attention to narratives fractured by Indigenous erasure, displacement, and colonial identities.
After completing a Master of Fine Arts from Bath Spa University in 2021, she went on to exhibit her work in Bath, London, New York, and Japan, including a residency with the BEPPU Project in Kyushu, Japan, where she immersed herself in local clay practices. She’s given public talks on her artistic practice in Japan and England, and in Spring 2022 Ani was a featured artist in A Gathering Together, a literary journal dedicated to elevating works that resonate across time and space.
