Sadé Mica: Nothing Unseen

Greg Thorpe

In the first of a two-part series, Greg Thorpe meets artist Sadé Mica – whose art both celebrates and problematises the edges of identity – ahead of an exhibition of their work that will be curated by both of them and presented at PAPER in Manchester alongside artist Sarah Hardacre in 2021.   

Artist Biog:

Sadé Mica / sha day mee sha / Artist / b. 1995 / New Moston, Greater Manchester / Studied at University of Salford / Pisces: Artistic, Sensitive, Reserved / Chinese Zodiac Year of the Pig: Optimism, Independence, Justice / Millennial / Birth Flowers: Violet, Primrose / Photography / Video / Installation / Textile / Costume / Performance / Writing / Sculpture / Print / Birth Stones: Amethyst, Onyx, Jasper / @sademica

Soundtrack:

At time of writing, Sadé Mica turns me on to a pulsating track called ‘Freefall’ by KAYTRANADA. The song seems to come in halfway through, as if the chorus is already up and running when you arrive. It’s chill, and at the same time has this great energy so at first you think you might not want to dance, but then you do. Chill. Unique energy. This is how I think about Sadé Mica when I meet them. ‘Freefall’ is on KAYTRANADA’s 2019 album ‘BUBBA’. I invite you to play the track while you’re reading this article. In fact, play the whole album; it’s great. Estelle’s on there, and Pharrell and Tinashe. I’m playing it while I’m writing this, join me. It’s on Spotify.

Current & Upcoming Shows:

‘It Teks Time’ @ OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich, closes 15 March | ‘givin u coy givin u smize’ @ iMT Gallery, London w. Paola Ciarska and Salut C’est Cool, closes 22 March #givinucoy #givinusmize | ‘GENDERS: Shaping and Breaking the Binary’ @ Science Gallery London, closes 28 June | ‘Soft Bodies’ (group show) @ Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, runs 20 March – 10 May

Glossary:

Malham. Queer. Organza. Moston. Squarespace. #givinusmize. Insta. Trans Masc. Tumblr. Tripod. Binder. Science Gallery. Puffa. 

Article:

Sadé Mica’s website has expired. They are relaxed about it. “I’m on Insta?” they offer, and I massively feel my age because of course what does it matter if there’s no website? It doesn’t, it probably matters only to art writers like me. Sadé is who I think of when I think of a post-internet artist, a completely post-internet person in fact. Both queer and internet cultures are in rapid acceleration and they are a person of both worlds. “Stuff I was tapping into in my teens is suddenly being talked about everywhere.” Online has more or less always been a place they could turn to. Their art practice, their exposure to different expressions of gender, their sense of a wider and different world from home, school and uni; these things have all been informed by their internet life. 

Sadé Mica and I meet at the artist Maurice Carlin’s small studio on the fourth floor of Islington Mill in Salford where I work. (It’s freezing out and Maurice has kindly put the heater on ahead of time for us. Artists caring for artists.) I can imagine Sadé fitting in at Islington Mill sometime in the future. They studied at Salford, are not long graduated, and currently have no studio of their own so are either producing their work at home or else driving out solo to the countryside beyond Manchester to make new film pieces and to take their beautifully poised/carefully posed self-portraits away from the city in front of green pastures, rocky pools and waterfalls. There is bemused acceptance from their family about their art, something many first-generation university-trained artists might have experienced. Similarly: “Art wasn’t anything that was pushed at school. When I told them I wanted to do art they sort of seemed disappointed. They were like, ‘But you’re clever, Sadé?’”

Sadé Mica’s art moves deftly and playfully between many mediums, including costume, sculpture and performance. Right now, nothing (“except for painting”) feels out of bounds to them and that’s a special time to meet an artist. One of their newest pieces is a white bed sheet that has been painstakingly hand-stitched with a succession of words and phrases (“stop asking why, it only gets me more frustrated”/ “my body’s given up on meeee”). The piece was produced just in time for their current solo exhibition ‘It Teks Time’ at OUTPOST Gallery in Norwich. Sadé explains: “I went to counselling last year and the words are an amalgamation of my notes from the sessions: a more tangible realisation of things I learned.” Why a bed sheet? “I wanted it to become a physical thing because it just felt so big.” Big enough to be covered up and held by.

Counselling recurs as subject matter in other work Sadé Mica has produced for the OUTPOST show. A film features two discarded office chairs positioned facing one another, recreating an iconic patient/counsellor set-up – except that they are located in a field by the riverside in Malham, North Yorkshire. Sadé is seated in one of the chairs. “I feel good this week,” they say to the empty chair opposite. “I think I realise that everything is so much bigger than me… I feel like a different version of me.” We see the making of the work, but with it, the rarer making of the person who makes the work. This kind of behind-the-scenes insight is typical of the artist’s casual intimacy, given in such a natural way that the outdoor middle-of-nowhere natural setting itself becomes gradually less and less strange. The chairs and the grass and soil of the ground itself move indoors, onto the gallery floor, to become a souvenir of the installation. The boundary between urbanity and nature is a fluid one that the artist playfully commands.

For our second meeting I have invited Sadé Mica to a queer salon – an open forum for conversation where this month’s chosen topic is pronouns. Drag, fluidity, language and community all come up in discussion, as does trans and non-binary identity. Sadé is non-binary, you’ve probably spotted they/them pronouns in this text already. One of the provocations of the salon is: Can art and performance help navigate gender and pronouns? Sadé shares how their art is the place where they have been “working out” both their gender identity and gender expression. They say something important that seems to encapsulate the interaction, even tension, between community and individuality – something that will recur in our conversations: “They/them works for me for now, but my name, Sadé, would be my ultimate pronoun.” 

This “working out” takes place in Sadé’s current work around reimagining binders. Binders are usually handy, if uncomfortable, stretch garments that are worn around the torso and under the clothes to flatten and conceal breasts for those who have them and don’t want them to be visible that day. This is usually done so their gender will be more likely read as masc or masculine of centre, or maybe more neutral or butch (motives and identities vary greatly). Binders are popular with trans men, trans masc and non-binary people. Their very function means they are intended to be hidden away but Sadé Mica’s binders are stylish couture items, designed to be seen and celebrated, worn in their film and performance work, displayed in gallery spaces, modelled, ingeniously rendered using their own bespoke patterns in wilfully inappropriate materials like organza, denim, canvas, pleather, taffeta and Puffa fabric.

Sadé’s binders are ironic things, particularly when they deliberately display the breasts themselves – the very things binders are usually meant to disguise – maybe with a cute cleavage-revealing keyhole cut-out or even made from clear PVC. Sometimes the binders feature intricate stitched lettering that carries messages designed to make you lean in, read and decipher. They are not about hiding at all, they are a queer recreation that serve to remind us how many facts and artefacts in queer and trans life are meant to be unseen or considered unspeakable. Five o’clock shadow. Breasts. PrEP. PEP. Douches. Packers. Hormones. Strap-ons. Queer and trans people are supposed to appear complete and discrete for the cis-het gaze but Sadé’s binders refute this boring nexus of shame and acceptability. Trans people are often encouraged or rewarded for living ‘stealth’, that is, concealing their transness. Sadé Mica explains that for a visually driven person like themselves, ‘stealth’ holds little appeal. It’s more important to be seen in their totality.

“My work was the catalyst or the vehicle for even approaching my identity. In second year of uni, I started making work about myself. I didn’t really have anyone to have those conversations with. There were people who came out as gay but again it was a very binary thing, so I started using my work as a vehicle to explore those parts of me. Because it was art, it wasn’t fixed, it was always changing and growing. It meant I could change; I could figure out myself. I didn’t just have to KNOW! [snaps fingers]. It definitely has made me become more comfortable in myself.”

It’s hard to overstate and certainly difficult to summarise the radical shifts around gender we are living through. Our language and our understanding of the gender spectrum is evolving to such an extent that artists as young as Sadé are actively engaged in pioneering a kind of creative visibility for their communities. As the artist recalls, even from a young age, “I was frustrated that I couldn’t find writing about people like me, about Black trans masculine people. Not academic writing, not anything!” Now, when young queer Black non-binary people turn to the internet, they will find the work of Sadé Mica, whose art both celebrates and problematises the edges of identity – not just around gender but also what is nature or what is natural – in a way that connects them to a long and proud heritage in queer art that has itself progressed radically.

I’m back to thinking about identities and about the possibility of a (queer?) utopia where our names are our ultimate pronouns. Experience suggests that those who insist ‘labels are for jars’ often simply don’t want to do the work of learning, accommodating or – least of all – celebrating our many variances and the breadth of lived experience. Artists do that, but perhaps they pay for it in ways that we need to be more sensitive to. Lesbian filmmaker. Gay novelist. Bisexual poet. Transgender DJ. Queer performer. Working-class Queer non-binary Black artist. Who gets to be the artist without prefixes? Who would like to be? Who gets to choose when and for what purpose they are prefixed? Which of us gets to celebrate representation and not shoulder the burdens of it? The closer that one is to privilege the more individuated life experience is permitted to be. This is a conversation about power.

“I can’t always clarify: This is just me! This is just me! I speak for myself and what I believe. If someone doesn’t get that, it’s their ignorance. I don’t carry that too heavy on me. If every article is like ‘Black Queer Artist! Black Queer Artist!’ – I mean, I don’t want to be a spokesperson. We are vast. Everyone is different.”

Sadé Mica’s work both is and emerges from an intersectional place. In their films and the stills produced alongside them, the artist reproduces elegant poses taken from life-drawing, traditionally a white and binary world. What do these poses mean on a Black non-binary body, sometimes wearing binders, taken far from the city where such things might more confidently be ‘read’? To the viewer, Sadé’s poses might seem serene and resplendent, but in real life they might have been witnessed by onlookers with bemusement, discomfort or hostility. A questioning white gaze can and does turn even nature into a racialised experience. Ley lines are not the only invisible boundaries out on the hillsides.

“One time I was coming home from my friend’s house in Chorley, past all these farms, and it was a really nice sunset, so I pulled up on this road and started filming there with my tripod and posing. Then this car wanted to come past so I took my tripod down quickly, went to my car and moved it. The car pulls up and a guy rolled down the window and says, ‘Was that a gun?’ … I mean, why would I, the only Black person for miles, be here with a big shot gun? I said, ‘No it’s a tripod, I’m an artist,’ and his tone changed. ‘Oh, carry on if you want!’ I don’t know that he would have asked a white person that…”

Sadé Mica’s binders and their film and photography work in nature look like that rare art experience: something new. bell hooks talks about being colonised “in our imaginations,” which is the reason she has been so critically engaged in the way that Black artists have imaged themselves. Sadé’s binders insist that we see the perennially unseen. Their nature poses remind us of the travel or holiday images we rarely encounter in visual culture. Where are the postcards that feature Black bodies in joyful and natural surrounds? Where especially can the queer Black body reside in nature for its own peace and enjoyment and creative expression? We discuss how they might create some of their own postcards using their film imagery to offer a playful aesthetic counterpoint to this lack. In September, we will co-curate a show of their work at PAPER, Sadé’ Mica’s first solo show in Manchester, and perhaps those new types of postcards might feature there.

A joint exhibition of work by Sarah Hardacre and Sadé Mica will show at PAPER in 2021. All images courtesy of the artist.