Sheila Maurice-Grey: the musician and artist to excite London’s creative scene
Photography by Mário Pires on Flickr
British artist and musician Sheila Maurice-Grey shares the message and inspiration behind her work in an interview with Katie Sperring.
London has a vibrant creative scene, home to a melange of cosmic characters and art collectives. All around are eclectic and wonderful cultures dovetailing one another to produce art. In London, art as a form of empowerment and of political self-expression is at the forefront, nowhere more strongly than among young Black Britons. Sheila Maurice-Grey epitomises this use of art as a vehicle for political expression, mobilising it in all forms of her own work. In an interview with Pi Media, the young trumpeter and painter affirmed herself as a thoughtful artist, in whose work exploration, immortalisation and empowerment of Black musical and political culture is at the centre.
Maurice-Grey grew up in Vauxhall, southwest London, her mother from Sierra Leone, father from Guinea Bissau and step-father from South Africa and Zimbabwe. African influences are intricately interwoven with African-American jazz in her solo music as well as in collectives, KOKOROKO and Nérija. These influences, specifically the likes of Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard and Fela Kuti, were nurtured by Kinetika Bloco and Tomorrow’s Warriors - an exuberant performance group and musical education organisation that Maurice-Grey called her “route into jazz.” The youth project draws influences from the Caribbean, western and southern Africa as well as New Orleans jazz to produce a “unique new British Carnival sound.”
A music project run by the non-profit organisation, The Vessel, in Kenya is where she met KOKOROKO percussionist, Onome Edgeworth. Reflecting on KOKOROKO, of which she is bandleader, Maurice-Grey said she thought it would be “empowering to bring together a bunch of young Black musicians” and to immortalise the likes of “Fela Kuti, Ebo Taylor and the Afrobeat and Highlife genres” through their own music. Evidence of burgeoning success is prolific, whether it be the growing popularity of their music and their influence among Generation Z musicians, or their 2019 performances at the Glastonbury festival and London’s renowned Roundhouse concert venue.
Maurice-Grey is also part of a predominantly female jazz septet, Nérija, whose music is rich with cultural nuance drawing from jazz, soul and hip-hop. Nérija is uniquely powerful for the coalescence of many female musicians, all of whom are formidable in their own right. Bringing Maurice-Grey together with the likes of Nubya Garcia and Cassie Kinoshi, they channel icons like Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane with exciting vibrancy to trailblaze within genres that previously excluded women. Their union, like that of KOKOROKO, is also beautifully metaphorical for the current state of London’s jazz scene; exceptional artists collaborate and feed off one another, to produce individual brilliance and collective empowerment. Maurice-Grey cited contemporaries like Moses Boyd, Shabaka Hutchings, Ambrose Akinmusire and Chelsea Carmichael as her influences. This interaction produces a music scene that does not simply subsist but thrives on this network of young, Black Britons.
Nérija is notable for its Black female presence, music being a specific form of Black women’s empowerment. Maurice-Grey’s self-exploration transcends her musical endeavours and is the chief influence for her painting and sketching too. Her work explores themes of Blackness, misrepresentation and hypersexualisation Black women have faced throughout history. She has studied the story of Sarah Baartman, a Black woman known as “Hottentot Venus,” who paraded through European “freak shows” in the 18th century; as well as “Blackface minstrelsy” - a theatrical form featuring white minstrels posing as slaves with black-painted faces. These influences are manifested in her paintings which frequently caricature the Black female form in a manner comparable to the images of “Hottentot Venus.” The theme of misrepresentation is clear; the paintings are a vehicle to reclaim the depiction of the Black female form and reclaim the self from misrepresentation. “As Black women,” Maurice-Grey says, “and especially as visual artists, all our work is a form of self-reflection and self-expression.” According to Maurice-Grey, it is this prism through which she views her work that makes it “one thousand per cent political.”
These paintings typify the idea of art as political. Creating and disseminating such artwork reclaims the self for empowerment and is a form of resistance. Has she responded to recent events and the surge in the Black Lives Matter movement in her artwork? No, for the negotiation of questions of race and racism is for her a lived reality, something of which she has “been conscious since secondary school” with all of her work, until now and into the future, being “a product of that.”
The theme of empowerment dovetails throughout her music and paintings, to be impressed upon herself, Black Britons and women, and to incite awe and appreciation in all. Though she wishes to await the outcomes of the next few years before making any judgment on the success of her own work and questions how we should measure success, her work thus far evidences a formative influence on both London’s creative scene and the empowerment of young, Black Britons and Black cultural brilliance.