The edges of the city of Nottingham can feel decidedly grey when overcast, not least in the areas surrounding Primary. In amongst the grey, housed in a beautiful old Victorian school building adorned with sunshine yellow branding, Primary is a warm invitation, a favourite haunt of mine. I’m often drawn here as an anonymous visitor by the smell of bread, books, concrete and black coffee. But I arrive this time with a different purpose and have dressed to impart something of myself: a cobalt-hued cardigan, a multi-coloured glass statement ring, and a pair of trusty, high-waisted, forest green trousers.
‘You’re wearing green!’ is their first greeting as I meet Jade Foster, Public Programme Curator at Primary, and Maia Ruth Lee, Colorado-based artist. Lee is here to open her first solo show in the UK after two weeks of intensive workshops in residency. I would come to realise the significance of green in the exhibition (and indeed colour more broadly) as the three of us spent an hour talking and moving through the two gallery spaces, pulling us into two connected yet opposing spheres – that of the worldly and the spiritual.
Born in Busan, South Korea, and having lived in Kathmandu, Seoul, New York and now Salida, Colorado, Maia Ruth Lee is clearly familiar with life in transit, and with it, questioning received understandings of the self ‘in motion’. Her own movement alongside the movement of others – navigating airports, border surveillance and a sense of collective humanity – have informed the works presented in this show: new additions to an ongoing series of sculptures which are collectively titled ‘Bondage Baggage’ (2018-present), as well as a large-scale artwork ‘Bondage Baggage Banner’ (2024-25). Made through intimate and communal processes of exchange, these new works tie together the threads of Primary’s recent public programming agenda, the local community of migrant women in Nottingham and Lee’s own previous practice in after-school arts education and social justice, into a longer throughline of commissions, exhibitions and community projects at Primary. Both Lee and Foster understand the urgency of working in this way, against the backdrop of increasingly hostile conditions for migrants, disabled and queer people, and the difficulties of maintaining an artistic practice within these intersectionalities. Our conversation emphasised the need for vulnerability and dignity in the making of this exhibition.
We first venture into the worldly realm on the ground floor in Gallery One. Here, I quickly understood the connection to the colour green: around the edge of the white gallery, a stripe of two-inch green tape directs the eye around the space, drawing my focus towards five sculptures in the centre of the room. Assembled like totems, the sculptures are each composed of two to four pieces of anonymous luggage, each bundle wrapped, taped, tied, squashed and belted into shape. I am immediately struck by the graphic quality of each piece of baggage: one, a tall, black, plastic-wrapped box on its side strung with a stark grid of white rope, where, on closer inspection, green paint is swiped across the surface and black and green ropes are looped into the grid. On the floor, a polyethylene bundle is taped into the size of a seat cushion with translucent neon-yellow tape, with teal- and mint-coloured ropes knotted into a constellation of lines around the package. Balanced on top of the black box is a white ripstop fabric sausage, a mysterious dark interior showing through the clear squares of the plastic fabric, where the repeated words ‘FRAGILE’ in bright red tape cover up the seams and folds where we might begin to grasp the contents. It is wrapped like a piece of meat to be strung up to cure, lilac and apple-green twine and rope squashing the soft contents to the point where the material pushes out between the squares.
Elsewhere other materialities emerge– cyan plastic hardshell suitcase, zipped but unlocked; a giant bean bag made of clear tarpaulin and filled with black material; above it, another set of three bundles tied together horizontally, each wrapped in white plastic, and brown and red tape, and roped together with blue, white and teal; a canvas dumpling held together with safety pins and green and white rope; a precarious tower of a large pillowy piece, wrapped in blue and white plastic with neon orange tape stripes; a tan leather suitcase with a large buckle holding the bag through the middle, and two more silver buckles on the side of the leather handle.
A decidedly different assemblage draws you to the centre of the collection. A rusty blue metal suitcase lies open with a glorious red embroidered fabric spilling out onto the floor. A cardboard box bordered with bright yellow tape sits next to it, fragile arrows pointing upwards. Unlike the other objects in the room, the contents here are revealed for us to see: several crumpled sheets of newspaper and a large, printed photograph depicting women in South Asia carrying packages on their heads.
This haphazard tactile accumulation of luggage feels at first joyous and amusing, emotions that colourful, lop-sided forms often instil. But unpacking ‘Bondage Baggage’ draws out the contradictions encapsulated in these objects. The title itself already bears weighty feelings of past traumas and hopeful futures– is the act of ‘bondage’ a trapping or the wrapping of a gift? Does the ‘baggage’ belong to the past and a past self, or does it speak to the possibility of what is to come? What is being protected, and from whom or what?
As we move through the room, Foster explains their thinking behind these dualities. The ‘bondages’ act as a system to seal and protect – they are meant to contain, conceal and prevent ‘tampering’ with the contents. The construction of the luggage is designed to be opaque, a reminder of philosopher Édouard Glissant’s call for a ‘right to opacity’ in the context of the Caribbean, a place of Foster’s heritage. The luggage is a highly visible expression of agency; in packing this way, a migrant takes control of their material existence and, by extension, their own bodies, against surveillance and policing systems. For Foster, ‘Bondage Baggage’ displays two modes of existence at work. In their experience as a queer, disabled curator, the sculptures demonstrate a conjuncture between ‘disclosure’ and ‘discretion’ within these identities. The contents of the luggage are only disclosed if its maker permits you to know, at their own discretion. The technicalities of how these objects are made, intricate weaving and knotting which simultaneously articulate and confound the process, are passed along in small circles through family, friends and acquaintances. At the same time, their ubiquitous materiality suggests a common knowledge, where each unique form still retains the hand of others and tying becomes a universal language of obscurity. Such a process requires a level of trust. Not everyone gets to access such inside knowledge.
As our own impressions of each other begin to relax, I become party to some of these secrets. The green paint swipes were, in fact, added by Lee at a later stage in the making of the exhibition. Each piece was brought together through friends and participants at the gallery, stuffed full of clothes, sheets, bedding, coats, rags partly donated by residents and staff at Primary. That blue plastic suitcase was loaned by Heya Nottingham. The large tarpaulin bed was stuffed with the blackout curtains normally hung in the gallery, folded, shaped and taped by the technicians and left on the floor, accidentally merging with the luggage pieces that were made to be exhibited. Lee emphasised the serendipities in the processes of producing the exhibition – where does storage and luggage begin and end? – and the stories built by using and reusing and reusing again. It was important to Lee that these objects were embedded with the real-life experiences of the space they inhabited. It matters how the baggage is filled, and how the process is a cycle of redistribution: of material, but also a redistribution of the power that comes with ideas of authorship.
Other subtle narratives were in plain sight but further informed by a knowledge of Primary’s own web of people, places and events. Associate Curator Raghavi Chinnadurai contributed her ‘trunk petti’, the open blue box in the centre of the room, a piece connected to her grandmother’s migration story. The photograph within is from Primary’s Winter programme Kolam. Another remnant of past programmes comes from the brown, belted suitcase atop one of the assemblages, belonging to Angolan/Portuguese artist Sofia Yala (who previously participated in the Landedness programme with South African collaborative MADEYOULOOK in 2022). Yala’s suitcase belonged to her paternal Angolan grandfather, and held an archive of family photographs, documents and mail on his journey. The suitcase became a significant part of Yala’s photography practice and photographic series, ‘The Body as an Archive’. Foster’s own material contribution emerged as well – the small, two-tier pile (the black box, safety pinned canvas) made from the leftover pieces from the community workshops. These gestures in the exhibition draw a continuation through Primary’s past works and Foster’s practice as curator. In the interest of building cyclical, long-term relationships and engagements, their physical inclusion emphasises an ongoing generosity and conversation where endings flow into new beginnings – the contents continue to be in motion.
Turning around to leave the gallery, the green stripe draws you around and out of the space. Lee and Foster tell me that the green line, positioned on the wall at around my shoulder height, symbolises a horizon, a free passage and a ‘bowtie’ connecting with Gallery Two upstairs. In following the green we are brought to the spiritual realm. I was reminded of the feeling of leaving an airport through the green customs passage – nothing to declare; at least, not unless I choose to.
Upstairs, we find a lofty space in the roof of the Victorian school. From the original beams, six elongated banners, each over 11 metres long, are draped in two rows of three. One end of each piece of fabric is rolled along the floor, grounding the banners in place as the fabric turns towards the ceiling. Each piece is painted using a different colour: black, green, blue, white, yellow, red. The paintings look like snakeskins; jagged edges of colour, haphazard grids with imprints of black or white unfurl over the beams and hang loosely on the other side. The underside of each painting is saturated in their respective colour. Otherworldly as these pieces feel in the airy, almost ecclesiastical space, subtle remnants of the human hand can be recognised in their making, such as the carefully sewn seams on the underside of the canvas, the bleeding of the ink on the fabric, or the particular arrangement of the grids in each print. After a moment, I recognise how these imprints were made, painted onto fabric through the ropes and strings from the floor below and released into their final spiritual form. The resulting paintings together read like intricate maps, displaying the simultaneous pathways and directions people are taking, for different rhymes and reasons, from all corners of the world.
These six banners together form ‘Bondage Baggage Banner’ (2024-25), a second iteration of the work. In fact, five of the banners (black, blue, white, yellow and red) first debuted as a part of Lee’s installation ‘Once we leave a place is it there’, displayed at the Institute of Fine Art and New York University in 2024. Each colour corresponds to the five hues of the obangsaek, the five cardinal directions and elements in Korean traditional culture. The green banner was made in the weeks leading up to the exhibition at Primary, in a workshop led by Lee with a group of local migrant women from Heya Nottingham. Together they worked on the final green banner, tying and talking about their experiences under increasingly hostile conditions for migrants in the UK, which in turn led to mutual exchanges of worlds: Foster cooked for the group, and in return Lee and Foster were invited into the women’s world to pray and break fast together. Lee and Foster talked about the symbolism of green as it channels through the show from Gallery One below. Green shows the way; it is a spiritual safe passage; it is the relationships and community between these cardinal directions and material elements.
—Vivien Chan
