Hypha Studios

Last in the series of a three part residency programme created in partnership with Barking and Dagenham Council - Sequoia Barnes was artist in residence at Alderman Jones's house on the Becontree Estate. She is a textile artist with mixed practices that include installation, assemblage, and performance. It is predominately centered around making processes, rituals, and modes of fashioning. Trained in semiotics, she deploys research through praxis often in her scholarly and artistic explorations of black diasporic symbolisms, storytelling as performance, and positioning the creative process as a performance/ritual. Her most recent work is a quilt/shrine devoted to communicating with ancestors.

She was interested in using the house as a studio space, a change of environment to inspire further research and development on the performance costume/object experimentation she was doing in residency at the Center for Contemporary Art in Glasgow. The wallpaper in the sitting room had potential to not only be re-imagined as a quilt pattern but also as a site for performance experimentation. She engaged with Valence House Gardens as well as the 16th century wall painting inside Valence House as sites of inspiration.