Snapshot 09: Scouse Bird? by Sandra Mutukwa
Reception Corridor, John Lennon Art and Design Building, Liverpool School of Art and Design.
March 17, 2025 – April 14, 2025
Monday – Friday, 9:00am – 5:00pm
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Snapshot presents Snapshot 09: Scouse Bird? by Sandra Mutukwa.
Sandra Mutukwa is a Level 6 BA Fine Art student. Born in Wrocław, Poland, to a Polish mother and Zambian father, she grew up and currently resides in Liverpool. Her multidisciplinary practice explores the internal conflict of being a mixed-race immigrant, and approaches abstract themes by envisioning dystopian worlds that combat the traditional sense of identity lost during relocation. Her work predominantly utilises oil painting and printmaking with textual components to disclose sentiments of a lack of identity. Inquiring into her refusal of citizenship and the trauma of migrating during early childhood years, Sandra simultaneously acknowledges that her multiracial ethnic background is a product of migration. She aims to bring awareness to her experience without demonising immigration, holding the oppressors in positions of power accountable for insisting harmful rhetoric within the media.
The project on display, Scouse Bird? (2024-2025) is a body of work created in response to the anti-immigration riots of August 2024 in Liverpool and other regions. During this time, Sandra witnessed a bird fall to its death in her garden, causing great distress in sounding like a brick has been thrown at the window. This has developed a train of thought in imagining a world where people migrate as birds do, and the implications that would result in; likely in chaos like riots. Comparing these two narratives through the overlapping theme of trauma, as well as dual meanings in the artwork titles and the series overarching title (alluding to the personification of the bird as a self-portrait), Sandra is attempting to communicate the questioning of identity and the search for a solution.
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Curatorial team for this edition:
Francesca Fryer
Amy Dcruze
Sophie Donovan
Olivia Neill
Jamie Newall
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Snapshot is a permanent display programme of sequentially changing creative outputs. It provides an impression of each participant’s practice located in a liminal space in the School, where visitors spend only fleeting moments whilst travelling to other spaces or waiting to enter classes.
The project is the result of an ongoing open call to all visiting researchers and practitioners, staff and students of all levels on all programmes at Liverpool School of Art and Design.
It presents incomplete, transitory views of research-and-practice-in-progress; a window into a brief moment in time of a given academic year. The displays are selected based on aesthetic criteria of how to best animate the space they occupy, projecting forwards in time the potential each work holds.
As the year progresses a living archive will develop on the concrete pillar next to each pair of vitrines, providing information about past and current displays.
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Developed by Dr James Schofield, Dr Hana Leaper and Dr Christine Eyene (Exhibition Research Lab), and managed by students from the MA Exhibition Studies programme.
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