“If a braid is made of water, if a line is bent as fluid, if a poem is made of gas, if a hand is deft as air.” —fahima ife1
Malcolm Peacock’s 2024 sculpture Five of them were hers and she carved shelters with windows into the backs of their skulls coalesces as a maybe tree, spirally twisting and gathering as fiber, color, hair, and word.2 Maybe is maybe here because before it is figure, Five fuzzies into view as a woven and braided, textured and turned, bloom of green, brown, orange, and blue. More than figural presence, Peacock’s sculpture pushes against discernment; along with the errant stray hair or knotted tangle that juts off the tree’s outer garment, what remains unseen harbors the trace of the sculptor-braider’s hand. An in/visible communion that sat with and wove each braid, their togetherness making for the maybe tree’s abstract bark. Synthetic fibers gathered such that they caressed and warmed the concrete form beneath. A sculptural textural “consent not to be a single being.”3
Powerfully, the hours-long sitting with and braiding of strands of green and brown hair, hours when the artist purposely enlisted minimal assistance, elaborates what scholar Rizvana Bradley might describe as a sculptural practice “of tending, of sending, inducing us to sense a dimensionality of that which is beyond universal perception.”4 While Bradley refers particularly here to the “welding” work of poet Aracelis Girmay in conjunction with sculptor Simone Leigh, Peacock’s braiding arguably also enacts what Bradley calls the “anti-monumentality of the monumental recovery of black female desire.” As Peacock explained in an e-mail to me, what his hands in/visibly hold are the aesthetic and philosophical instructions of his mother: “The title (Five of them were hers and she carved shelters with windows into the backs of their skulls) [refers] to my mother’s hair braiding practice as well as her statement to my siblings that ‘you can go anywhere.’ The only places where you don’t belong are ones where you have decided you shouldn’t be. I refer to this through the use of the shelter and windows as spaces of both grounding and daydreaming that I feel my mom’s words perfectly describe. The shelter as the reminder and the windows as the possibility.” Rizvana Bradley and Hortense Spillers might together describe Peacock’s inspiration, here, as the artist’s “anteaesthetic” experience of being “handed” by her (his mother), evoking an unavailable “dimensionality” forged in the meeting place of fingers, memory, and hair.5
Along with the poet fahima ife’s epigraph to this essay, Peacock indeed attunes us to Black hair-braiding’s undervalued aesthetic interventions. Reflecting on the artistic work of Black beauticians, ife writes: “What the hands can do in space with raw materials, metallic and plastic tools, makes time bend. It occurs to me the type of geometric braid work of a quantum black beautician is a matter of minimalism, repetition, the looping of a recurrence set in motion on the first run. In the time it takes to fashion a series of rows and sequences, a world opens up, a way inside adornment, previously unacknowledged or obscured.”6 Moreover, along with his braiding-sculptural practice, Peacock uses sound to protectively “open up” a world. Resounding in the ether near the unseen top of the maybe tree, a 58-minute audio clip loops. Peacock, family members, and friends are heard meditating on breathing and endurance, familial and ancestral histories of Black survival. And it is here, amidst such conversation, that we hear the sounds of breathing itself, already texturally implied by Five’s physical form. That is, the sculpture, even though not outside, is integrally connected with an atmosphere sustained by the presence of unseen hands, an unseen life force that Fred Moten might say “aerates” the art work itself.7
At the onset of Five’s audio track, a choral chant of “Hold Keep Bind Stay” repeats, featuring the voices of Peacock and his friend Ainsley Brundage. Peacock chants alone first, then is joined by Brundage, the words doubling as a respirational forest grows. The grove made by the words “Hold Keep Bind Stay”—words spoken while both Peacock and Brundage run unseen distances—perhaps makes for another kind of shelter and window: a looping, threading, breathy braid of green sound running tide and tide with the sculptural-textural gesture of togetherness.
Put another way, we might say that such togetherness manifests in Five, as an un/seen collective moving. Returning to the audio, we soon hear Peacock and his sister enjoy a run together. In between the sounds of breathing and the pitter patter of feet, the siblings meditate on aerobic endurance, how the sustenance of energy and breath while lungs and feet are taxed in passage is lessened/softened/cushioned by remembering their loved ones breathing. What it meant to watch their father breathe for almost half a century while remembering what the sky’s air felt like the night he passed. From there, the artist’s sister’s voice recedes, and we hear Peacock thinking aloud while jogging, pondering what it means to move alongside other locomotive forms (cars, etc.): forms that could at any turn interrupt his passage. Violently and without warning. As he journeys, we hear the artist breathlessly grapple with these anytime-threats of passage’s endangerment all the while considering his own “reserves.”
What is more, Peacock arguably commons while breathlessly speaking during a jog. Through speech and through breathing itself, Peacock names and sustains what Rizvana Bradley calls “an imaginary ecology.”8 His strained exhalation aerates a dream of being in the world where his 4-year-old niece can feel protected and unconditionally loved: He wonders, “How do I protect her … when I call her after school, it’s hard for me not to see the smile of a boy in Gaza speaking into a camera with his friends saying … ‘I dream of my brother coming back to life’… how to hold and expand the possibility of these children’s lives … and all of our lives for that matter.” Here, I find scholar Ashon Crawley’s arguments on air’s relation to the history and practice of Black (social) life and to the history of anti-black oppression to be particularly compelling. He writes, “Air. It is an object that is shared, that is common, that is necessary for each movement, each act, each scene–whether of subjection or celebration.”9
Indeed, across the in/visible expanse of Five, these breathy dreams are never far from other Black freedom dreams. Tacked to the tree are pages culled from the writings of long-gone Black freedom fighters Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. Across those writings and the torn-out pages, Black radical desire manifests as a desire for more air, for flight, to be physically and spiritually released from American anti-Black violence and expenditure. To move unencumbered. One of the pages affixed to Five is from the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. It features the scene where Douglass’s plan to escape the Covey plantation is exposed. To get free, Douglass faked a travel pass. Now facing even more racist terror and surveillance (upon Covey’s learning of the plan), Douglass asks a collaborator to eat the pass and to “own nothing.”
The “own nothing” phrase doubles in signification. On the one hand, the phrase reads as Douglass’s instruction to his fellow freedom-seekers to forget the plan. To admit to nothing; to refuse the logic of Black kinetic desire as crime. On the other hand, “own nothing” suggests that another kind of freedom arrives in ownership’s refusal. In some ways, the maybe tree seems to open up the possibility of that interpretation. The green, brown-blurred subversion of category and figure, the ecological reach between and beyond arbitrary enclosure suggested by sculptural form itself along with the synthetic hair’s bristle with surrounding air along with the literary and auditory sounds of Black thinkers, artists, makers and runners… all of this lifts “own nothing” into the communion and the communism that the ensemble that is Five engenders.
“Own nothing” is also, too, maybe a green, braided, handmade, and hand-released instruction for a living and breathing Black freedom, felt on and with the earth. A freedom remembered in various forms of kinetic and respiratory passage, kinetic and respirational communions. On the other side of the tree, the page from Malcolm X’s autobiography describes freedom’s feltness in communion, where communion is lived as hills of faith and as earth. For Malcolm X, a pilgrimage to Mecca recalls his experience as “a little boy, eight or nine years old. Out behind our house, out in the country from Lansing, Michigan, there was an old, grassy Hector’s Hill we called it—which may still be there. I remembered there in the Holy World how I used to be on the top of Hector’s Hill, and look up at the sky, at the clouds moving over me, and daydream, all kinds of things.” As with “own nothing,” “Hector’s Hill” ethereally juts off the maybe tree like a green holy city, floating up to embroider with Peacock’s words and the remembered ones of his mother. A privately public all together—words, fiber, hair, paper, sound—that braids and enfolds into a deeply textured, ethereal Black ecosystem. An ecosystem that Peacock receives across time and space, enters and weaves and breathes into and passes on to share. And so, it is fitting that when the audio track ends before it loops, the last sound is that of Peacock and friends singing together.
At and with air, at and with sonic and textural togetherness, the sculpture protectively interlaces the trace, shape, and artistry of Black femme aesthetic instruction with the sonic and written passages expressing Black freedom. In that way, perhaps all along, the maybe tree was already more than figure and its subversion. That what Malcolm Peacock’s Five does is teach us a lesson about sculpture itself; how it often lives at the unowned flourish blooming through sculpture’s enclosing line.
: :
Endnotes
- These beautiful lines appear in fahima ife’s essay “skilled black hands braid geometric insignia as poetry,” Air/Light Magazine 1, no. 2 (Winter 2021).
- I witnessed Malcolm Peacock’s Five at MoMA Ps1 in October of 2024. The sculpture is Peacock’s contribution to the beautiful show “Pass Carry Hold: Studio Museum in Harlem Artists in Residence 2023–24” (featuring artists sonia louise davis, Zoë Pulley, and Peacock). The show at MoMA PS1 runs until February 10, 2025.
- The phrase “consent not to be a single being” was first used by Édouard Glissant in his book Poetic Intention, translated by Nathanaël (Brooklyn, NY: Nightboat Books, 2010). My encounter with the phrase is through Fred Moten’s scholarly work and which he also (Moten) uses to name his 2017-2018 Duke University Press trilogy of books: Black and Blur (2017), Stolen Life (2018), and The Universal Machine (2018).
- Peacock shared with me that he did most of the braiding himself though hired an assistant to help with a portion of the work. The quote by Rizvana Bradley appears in her 2019 eflux essay “A Gathering of Aporetic Form.” I thank the curator Sawubona, who reminded us of this great line by Bradley on their Instagram account @the.black.gaze.
- The phrase “handed by her” appears in Hortense Spillers’s essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 80. My use of the term “anteaesthetic” derives from my deep regard and appreciation for Rizvana Bradley’s book Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and The Critique of Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023), which powerfully critiques hegemonic aesthetic form’s interdictions of Black femme being and presence upon which it depends.
- ife, “skilled black hands,” 65.
- My belief that “aeration” is one of Five’s aesthetic and philosophical interventions is deeply informed by the following passage in Fred Moten’s essay “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 779. “There is an ethics of the cut, of contestation, that I have tried to honor and illuminate because it instantiates and articulates another way of living in the world, a black way of living together in the other world we are constantly making in and out of this world,[… that which] the (sur)real presence—of blackness serially brings online as persistent aeration, the incessant turning over of the ground beneath our feet that is the indispensable preparation for the radical overturning of the ground that we are under.”
- Rizvana Bradley, “Living in the Absence of a Body: The (Sus)Stain of Black Female (W)holeness,” Rhizomes, Issue 29 (2016).
- From Ashon Crawley’s book Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham, 2017): 36.
Sarah Jane Cervenak