Allana Clarke West Indies, b. 1987

The Tongue is a Muscle belongs to an ongoing body of work by Trinidadian-American artist Allana Clarke (b. 1987, West Indies), in which the artist literally wrestles with hair bonding glue as an expression of struggle and ritualistic transformation.

Clarke begins her sculptural process by pouring hair bonding glue—a liquid latex commonly used to adhere hair extensions onto a person’s scalp—onto panels made of window screen. As the glue begins curing, Clarke manipulates it by scraping, pulling, twisting, and pushing into it with her entire body. This performative process results in a sculptural relic that recalls Clarke’s first interactions with hair bonding glue as a child. She refers to those early experiences as “rituals indoctrinating me into a world that is anti-black.”

Says Clarke, “I of course have a complicated relationship with this material as these are rituals that were given to me by the matriarchs in my family and rituals that I thought to be normative and adopted them into my beautification practices. As I grew older I came to understand these processes aim to be removing me from notions of and proximity to Blackness, Black hair being something that is political and ‘radical.’ It is though not possible to extract my body from the narrative of Blackness, nor should that be a desire. That is the legacy that was passed down to me.”