An artist has spoken about how her experience of growing up as a half-Nigerian and half-British person in Hemel Hempstead has inspired her latest body of work.
Danielle Dean’s new sci-fi inspired film The Alien Invasion of Hemel Hempstead and technicolour watercolours explore the complex social fabric of her hometown.
Speaking about the work at the Frieze art fair last month, Danielle said: “It’s inspired by a town called Hemel Hempstead, which I actually grew up in. It’s looking at how Hemel was built in the 50s for social housing, for a lot of people that maybe lived in bombed-out housing.
“It was a really utopian project of bringing housing to a lot of white working class people in the UK at the time. So I was interested in the relationship, or the contradiction of how it was for me to grow up in this town as a bi-racial person.
“The work is all to do with thinking about that in relation to my own experience but also thinking about how Hemel is much more diverse and what is the reactions to that from people that have a kind of nostalgic idea of what Hemel used to be.”
Find out more at www.danielleadean.com
Photo credit: Frieze
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