In portraits shaped by memory, migration and repair, Gherdai Hassell uses collage, textiles, pigment and archival photographs to build new genealogies of Black womanhood.
Gherdai Hassell has built a practice where histories convene, waiting for her to tease out the stories they contain. In her studio, fabrics, inks and archival photographs become the raw material of excavation.
Hassell layers and reassembles these fragments that feel intuitive and deliberate, creating compositions that question how identity is constructed and who gets to author it. The result is work that does not just test the limits of visual eloquence; it challenges viewers to reckon with the narratives they have been taught to inherit.
Courtesy of the artist
Collage, textiles, ink, and paint give me a language of layering that mirrors the historical layering present within diasporic identity
Gherdai Hassell
Born in Bermuda, shaped by years of study in China, and now based in Manchester, Hassell creates work that travels as widely as she has. Her portraits, dense with texture, cultural memory, explore how the Black identity forms across distance and rupture.
The materials, including collage, textiles and pigment, do more than decorate the surface; they construct a topography of belonging. Layering, she says, is her way of building memory into the work, allowing the canvas to hold “the multiplicity we carry in our bodies”.
Hassell’s practice is grounded in archives, although she approaches them with equal parts reverence and interrogation, sometimes with the tenacity of Detective Columbo and his habitual “just one more thing”. She searches for images relegated to the margins of history: family snapshots, colonial records and community documents whose stories have been fractured, obscured from sight.
Hassell sits with these items of history until their absence speaks, this process is a form of listening, one that acknowledges what cannot be recovered, yet still insists on possibility.
In Hassell’s hands, the archive becomes porous, a site for repair. Figures are lifted from their original contexts and placed within new cosmologies, not to recreate the past but to reactivate it. This transformation is central; through reimagining, she restores agency to those who were previously misrepresented or erased.
Hassell’s commitment to re-centring the interior lives of Black women shapes both the visual and conceptual structure of her portraits. Her Alibii series, with its watchful, layered eyes, moves between past and future, carrying the weight of ancestral memory while opening new ways of apprehending the self.
The works began as protectors but have grown into witnesses that continue to evolve alongside Hassell’s practice. She treats them as living artefacts, embodiments of a lineage that is still unfolding.
Manchester’s textile history echoes through her recent work; the city’s industrial past, fused with her Caribbean heritage, informs Hassell’s use of cloth as a carrier of memory. Fabrics stitching the routes of passage, the island, the continent, the former empire, the diaspora. This sensitivity to movement shapes her understanding of home not as a fixed place but as an accumulation of lived experience.
Institutional recognition has arrived swiftly: a solo exhibition at the Masterworks Museum in Bermuda, inclusion in When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, and the Tim May Memorial Prize for Women in Art. These achievements have expanded her sense of responsibility. They place her work in direct conversation with a century of Black figuration, while pushing her to think critically about her own contribution to that evolving canon.
Navigating racial identity in that context sharpened her understanding of representation, leaving her determined to depict Black subjects with depth, agency and interiority.
As her practice grows, so does her ambition to build new genealogies of Black womanhood. Hassell hopes the works will act as portals for future generations: objects that hold knowledge yet leave space for reinvention. Her portraits refuse the ideals of singular identity; proposing a future in which Black women can see themselves and be seen by others with clarity and freedom.
Hassell’s work refuses a passive gaze. It insists that we examine the structures that inform how we look, and it helps us to remember even when the wider world forgets.
Your portraits often combine collage, textiles and paint into rich, tactile surfaces. How do you think about the relationship between material layering and the psychological or historical layering of Black identity and memory in your work?
Gherdai Hassell: In my work, the surface becomes a kind of terrain, sort of like landscapes we inhabited, built, eroded, repaired, and reimagined. Collage, textiles, ink, and paint give me a language of layering that mirrors the historical layering present within diasporic identity. We carry multiple histories at once within our bodies, whether it be ancestral knowledge, colonial fracture, diasporic movement, and our own lived experiences.
When I layer materials, I’m not just building texture, I’m layering memory. The mixed media of the work reflects the complexity of being, of multiplicity.
© Gherdai Hassell.
Courtesy the artist
You have described your practice as a form of storytelling rooted in personal and collective archives. Can you walk us through how you locate, select and reinterpret archival imagery, particularly when those sources come from colonial or fragmented records?
Gherdai Hassell: My process with archives is an act of looking, listening, and sometimes refusing. I begin by seeking out overlooked or marginalised records, family photos, community documents, colonial archives, and fragmented pieces of visual history. I sit with these images until they speak to me. I often find when sitting with archival material that what’s missing is as powerful as what’s present. I pull the figures out of their original contexts and place them into new cosmologies, restoring dignity and agency where once there was erasure or distortion.
It’s a reparative act. I’m not recreating the archive, I’m reactivating it, I’m transforming it. In that transformation, new stories emerge, stories that centre the interior lives of Black women rather than the gaze that documented them.
Courtesy the artist
Born in Bermuda, studied in China and now based in the United Kingdom, your life crosses multiple diasporic geographies. How do these movements shape your sense of belonging and influence the way you visualise “home” or lineage on the canvas?
Gherdai Hassell: Bermuda first and foremost will be the place that raised me, a permanent home that lives inside of me, in my body, my vernacular, my accent, my sensibility, is deeply Bermudian. However, moving between Bermuda, China, and now the UK has given me a layered sense of belonging. So ultimately, I don’t think of home as a fixed location, I often feel that I am a global citizen. Home is something I carry with me, an accumulation of places, people, and memories. These movements and migrations shape how I imagine how we become.
My figures often exist in hybrid or imagined worlds because that’s how I’ve experienced my own life, constantly navigating cultural intersections, language barriers, and shifting identities. So home really becomes a site of possibility rather than limitation. My diasporic journey makes me attentive to translation, how histories translate across oceans, and how bodies become living archives of those crossings. I feel I am all those things.
© Gherdai Hassell
Courtesy the artist.
Your recurring “Alibii” figures inhabit realms of past, present and future. Who are they to you now, after several years of developing them? Have they evolved beyond their original role as protectors and storytellers?
Gherdai Hassell: The Alibii began as protectors, guardians who could hold the encounters that felt too heavy for the body alone. Over the years, they’ve evolved into something more expansive. They are guides, witnesses, and sometimes mirrors. The eyes have become a metaphor for layers of identity, indicative of the layers of the onion, which I often reference in my work.
They move through past, present, and imagined futures with ease, offering alternative ways to see the self. It’s really about seeing the self. I think of them now as living artifacts , beings who are becoming, just like we are. They’ve grown alongside me, taking on new layers of story and intention as my practice deepens.
Many critics note that your work reclaims the Black female gaze. How consciously do you think about visibility, self-representation and the politics of who gets to look and who is looked at in your portraits?
Gherdai Hassell: Reclaiming the Black female gaze is an intentional part of my practice. Historically, Black women have been looked at through lenses shaped by power, exoticism, or invisibility. In my portraits, the gaze is centred and self-possessed. I think deeply about who is granted visibility, who controls the narrative, and who has permission to imagine themselves without constraint. As free, wild women. My figures look back, sometimes softly, sometimes defiantly. That reciprocity of looking is political. It insists that Black women are not objects but subjects, authors of their own image and story.
Courtesy the artist
Textiles and fabrics carry both aesthetic and cultural memory. What kinds of stories do these materials bring into your studio, and how do they help bridge your Caribbean heritage with wider diasporic narratives?
Gherdai Hassell: Textiles have easily become my favorite medium to explore. I love how they carry memory. The materials I bring into my studio, fabrics, dyes, patterns, hold cultural stories passed through generations. Growing up in Bermuda, I was surrounded by Caribbean colour, craft, and textile traditions. Those aesthetics meet the broader diasporic materials I encounter in the UK and beyond.
Now, living in Manchester, often referred to as Cottonopolis, and with my studio in a former textile mill, it’s hard to ignore the historical implications of place when making art. When I stitch, layer, or dye fabric, I feel like I’m weaving together these different geographies of the diasporic experience. Textiles allow me to bridge personal heritage with collective histories, they create a tactile lineage that connects the islands, the continent, the legacy of the UK empire and the diaspora.
You have described the body as an “avatar navigating physical, social and unseen worlds”. What possibilities and risks do you see in using the body as both a vessel of history and a site of transformation?
Gherdai Hassell: I think of the body as an avatar moving between the physical world, the social world, and the unseen world of spirit, memory. I love the idea of this because it’s as if the body becomes the site for the physical and spiritual world to meet itself. Using the body in my work allows me to explore both its possibilities and its vulnerabilities. The body holds trauma, but it also holds joy, resistance, and transformation. By using the body as a vessel, I can explore how identity is shaped and reshaped, how we carry history inside us, and how we transcend it. There is risk in exposing the body, but there is also immense power. It becomes a portal through which new narratives can emerge.
Courtesy the artist
This year has brought major institutional recognition, from your solo exhibition at Bermuda’s Masterworks Museum to inclusion in When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting. How have these contexts challenged or expanded the way you think about your own place within the canon of Black figuration?
Gherdai Hassell: I became an artist because I had a deep desire to become a maker. Someone who could translate experience. And I have intentionally sought to do this over the past T years with fever like I’ve never experienced before. Being included in major institutional exhibitions , like When We See Us has been transformational for me and what I’m doing in my studio. To be a part of Koyo Kouoh’s legacy is an accolade I will forever be humbled by. Her work and commitment to the black representation in art history is beyond. And my solo at Masterwork museum was one that stretched me on conceptually and technically. And then winning the Tim May Memorial prize for Women in art, has made me reflect on my place within the lineage of Black figuration.
All of these experiences are humbling and affirming. These spaces challenge me to think beyond my studio, to understand how my work dialogues with artists across time and geography. At the same time, I remain committed to making work that is intimate, rooted in story, and attentive to community. Recognition doesn’t solidify me, it expands me. With gratitude, It really just clarifies the responsibility and the urgency of the stories I’m telling.
Your training at the China Academy of Art is a fascinating chapter in your artistic journey. What philosophical or aesthetic lessons from that time still resonate in your work, and how did navigating racial identity in that space inform your approach to representation?
Gherdai Hassell: Studying at the China Academy of Art shaped me in profound ways. The emphasis on discipline, repetition, and mastery of technique still grounds my practice today. I learned to observe deeply and to respect the material. Philosophically, Chinese aesthetics taught me about balance, negative space, and the power of suggestion, how a gesture even in its simplicity can hold a narrative.
Navigating my own racial identity in that context also sharpened my awareness of representation. I was both visible and invisible, and that tension made me think critically about who gets to be seen. I became a critical thinker in China, an artist in China, so that place will always be significant to my story and practice. That experience deeply informs the way I paint Black people, with presence, agency, and interiority.
You have spoken of creating “new genealogies of Black womanhood”. Looking ahead, what do you hope future generations will find in your “living artefacts”? Are you building a lineage for others to inherit, or a portal for them to imagine anew?
Gherdai Hassell: I see my works as living artifacts, objects that carry knowledge forward. I hope future generations encounter them as invitations, to remember, to question, to imagine. But also to see themselves. I’m building a lineage, yes, but not one that dictates answers. Instead, I’m opening a portal. One that asks more questions.
My dream is that someone many years from now will stand in front of one of my portraits and feel both seen and expanded. That they will recognise themselves in the story but also find room to reimagine their own.
©2025 Gherdai Hassell
Contributing writer at Art Plugged chronicling contemporary art’s beautiful mess, when he can get there. Now edging behind the camera, making insightful documentaries about artists and the work that haunts them. Survives on openings, opinions, one gallery, one artwork at a time. Considers espresso a meal.
