Brown Girl Not in the Ring. Jhinuk Sarkar, Central Saint Martins, UK.
The opportunity that Shades of Noir gave me through the Teaching Within program was not one that I thought was ever open to me: To recognise my own area of expertise. To find value in my own education experiences. I didn’t know that any person would be interested, would appreciate my work, or find reference in it, let alone other students finding value in it for the sake of direction in their work. Teaching Within gave me space to reflect on a few important points in my arts education and subsequent practice as an 106 //
Illustrator and Disability access consultant: My voice as a postgraduate student interrogating my ‘Mother Tongue’ was not nurtured. I had no confidence to explore identity in my illustration work. People around me in ‘authority’ as teachers did not adopt any kind of transformational education principles that I can recall. The power seemed to lie within a definitive single story. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
