Pickpocketed Inheritance
Nathaniel Sheppard III
Pickpocketed Inheritance begins with the archive as something inherited but never entirely innocent. Working across African and diasporic visual histories, I take images apart, shift their contexts and translate them through collage, painting and printmaking. I am interested in what happens when an image changes hands, and what becomes possible when its meaning is loosened from the circumstances in which it was first produced. The title plays on the tension between receiving a history and taking it for oneself. I approach inherited images with both intimacy and suspicion, treating them as material that can be cut, layered, repeated and remade.
The movement between mediums is central to this process. Images carry the histories of the forms that have contained them, and those forms have their own social, political and economic conditions. Printmaking, for instance, has long allowed images to disseminate cheaply and quickly, making it a powerful language for popular and political movements, while painting has historically been bound more closely to singularity, authorship and value.
Moving images between these languages changes not only how it looks visually, but how it speaks and who it can reach. Through this translation, I use the processes of painting, collage and printmaking as ways of thinking through histories that cannot always be explained directly. Pastel colour introduces another tension, offering softness and seduction as a means of approaching material that carries greater weight. It softens the blow without necessarily softening what lies beneath it.
