About the Artist
Grace Lynne Haynes investigates the relationship between painting, drawing, and storytelling through her usage of materials such as pastel, pigment and chalk to communicate elaborate fictional narratives of her own creation. Haynes incorporates an unconventional approach to drawing material and surface by applying pastel and pure pigment on primed paper. She explores how the process of world building can become a zone of creative and cultural liberation and a means of addressing racism and sexism by inventing new ways of being in the world. By fluidly shifting between fantasy and reality she utilizes the imaginative strategies of science fiction and Afrofuturism to envision alternative futures for people of African descent.
The fictional mythology underpinning the second chapter of her series The Sea is the Only Highway chronicles a futuristic natural water realm in which the protagonists are supernatural angelic beings that exercise their domain through movement, dancing, and chanting. She references the Kongo Cosmogram, an ancient symbol of the cycle of life that showcases the Kalunga — a body of water that beings must cross to reach the spirit realm. In Haynes’s mythology, water is the crossroad and entry point for her angels to enter our reality, rapturing our current world whilst creating and shaping a different future. Haynes asks questions about who owns our future, but also who is entitled to reason, speculate, and reckon with it. Her work dives into the deeply rooted potential — black feminine possibility — that has the potency to generate impact in our world. These invented characters are the prophetic vision of her ancestors and their arrival indicates the failure of our current humanist project and that there is so much more yet to come.
The semiotic language in Haynes’s work emerges from lived spiritual experiences, West African folklore, but also through her revisitation of religious texts and science fiction literature. The first chapters of her personal mythology reference Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptic novel Parable of the Sower, Zakiyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, and the Biblical parable of angels. These perspectives, though diverse in nature, speak to her inclination to build new worlds and locate herself within the rich history of the Black imagination and its ability to shapeshift and present alternative and creative possibilities to our unequitable reality. She approaches her visual world building language with memory, context, and history — as Zakiyah Iman Jackson concludes “When we say “the world” it is always someone’s idea of the world we are evoking, usually a Western Man and not that of a Black woman, and not that of a hen, not that of a microbe, and not that of a grain of sand.”
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Photo of Grace Lynne Haynes.
