Ritual and Material in Femi Dawkins’ Art Practice

Femi Dawkins performing his poetry in Amsterdam

Femi Dawkins (aka Jimmy Rage) is a London and Amsterdam-based multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges fractured diasporic and autobiographical narratives. His practice spans visual art, music, poetry and performance, engaging audio-visual media. He was selected for New Contemporaries (2021), the first Lisson Gallery artist prize, and won the prestigious Gieskes-Strijbis Podiumprijs in 2022, and was features in Gagosian’s landmark exhibition Rites of Passage. In what follows, this essay provides a deep analysis of Dawkins’ work, drawing on a primary interview and research to situate his themes and methods within critical theoretical frameworks and art-historical contexts.

Conceptual Framework

Dawkins’ oeuvre can be examined through the lenses of material culture and new materialist theory, which provide insight into his engagement with transforming materials. Contemporary scholars argue that objects and materials possess a vitality and agency of their own, beyond human symbolism. This vibrant matter perspective considers how Dawkins’ chosen media – whether lapis lazuli, beetroot, salt, or found dirt – actively shape the meaning of his work. Indeed, in his series My Ghostly MRI’s and Phantom Gaze Dawkins creates haunting portraits” on paper using these materials. These unconventional substances invoke historical and spiritual associations (lapis lazuli connoting history of extraction, salt and beetroot evoking human exploitation, preservation and blood). In this way, Dawkins engages in what might be called speculative materialism: a process where material transformation becomes a way to speculate on history, memory, and sense of self. The material metamorphosis in his work (for example, turning medical MRI scans into emotive blue abstractions with mineral and organic matter) suggests that materials themselves participate in the narrative, merging the human body, memory, and the earth.

Untitled (My Ghostly MRIs), 2024
Lapis lazuli, indigo, Indian ink, charcoal and salt on paper
210 x 151 cm

And Performativity is crucial for understanding Dawkins’ practice, as he frequently stages performances that entwine with his visual work. One’s identity itself is produced through repeated actions and expressions emanating from a kind of ancestral essence. Dawkins’ artistic trajectory exemplifies this, through the persona of Jimmy Rage and works like The Afro Galactic Dream Factory, an afro-techno vocal symphony he wrote and starred in, he demonstrates how performance can construct and communicate the self. His cross-Atlantic journeys led him to take on different personas in the process of finding meaning, indicating a fluid, theatrical approach to selfhood. Dawkins uses oration and ritual to bridge the gap between artwork and audience (as will be discussed later). This performative lens will help analyse how Dawkins’ embodied actions, voice, and alter-egos serve as extensions of his visual practice, enacting the very ideas of diasporic hybridity and spiritual invocation that his objects and images investigate.

Detail of a Phantom Gaze work.

Material Alchemy

One of the most striking aspects of Dawkins’ work is his approach turning everyday or symbolic elements into carriers of new meaning. In our extensive interviews, Dawkins spoke extensively about experimenting with physical substances and how changeability is central to his method. This is vividly illustrated by My Ghostly MRI’s, works from which were included at Gagosian’s landmark exhibition entitled Rites of Passage in London and in his recent solo exhibition in Amsterdam, with works both large and small that resemble medical imaging of MRI scans of heads that Dawkins conjures up with layers of lapis lazuli (a semi-precious blue pigment), beetroot juice, salt, and India ink. Such materials were deliberately chosen for their multivalent associations: the deep blue of lapis lazuli carries the weight of art history and spirituality (from ultramarine Renaissance Madonnas to Hindu divinities), while salt has ritual and preservative connotations, and beetroot’s blood-red stain evokes bodily life and death. By merging these into the greyscale of MRI imagery, Dawkins performs a material palimpsest by infusing scientific documents with emotional and cultural memory. Through material intervention, unspeakable trauma and grief - the “silence” - are given form or break their silence (turned into a tangible “punctuation”). The transformation of matter here is both literal and symbolic: it suggests that even inert materials (pigments, salts) can speak to communal memory when handled ritualistically.

Untitled (Phantom Gaze), 2024
Lapis lazuli, indigo, Indian ink, charcoal, salt on paper
270 x 151 cm

Dawkins employs what could be termed speculative materials, investigating the layers of meaning inherent in his chosen substances. In his sculpture works, Dawkins' gesture of alteration (turning pristine icons or dolls earthy with dirt) subverts canonical images and implants them with the dualities of diasporic experience of sanctity and suffering. The dirt signifies returning the figures to the clay of the Earth, perhaps referencing humanity’s shared origin. Such works exemplify Dawkins’ storytelling, where materials are charged with spiritual and political valences. Other artists and curators widely appreciate how Dawkins transmutes base elements in the way an alchemist might seek gold. Here the “gold” is a deeper truth about existence and resilience, distilled through pigments, soil, and salt.

Femi Dawkins performing his poetry for a friend at his studio in London.

Diasporic Identity and Fractured Narratives

A core theme emerging from both the interview and Dawkins’ body of work is the exploration of diasporic identity, that is, the identity forged in the context of displacement and hybrid belonging. Dawkins explicitly identifies as a child of the Diaspora journeying through liminal worlds. His personal history (born and raised in Jamaica, before moving to the US for higher education, and now working in Europe) positions him within the Black Diaspora network of trans-Atlantic cultures continuously mixing and redefining themselves. In conversation, Dawkins described how his work draws on autobiographical tales that cross borders, reflecting how migration led him to construct new identities and even adopt different personas. Rather than seeing his identity as a linear story with a clear beginning and end, he views it as nonlinear and open-ended, looping between past and future. This sensibility is vividly present in his art: many of his works layer time and memory in non-linear ways (e.g., ancestral references appearing in contemporary settings, or historical imagery collaged with futuristic elements).

Untitled (Phantom Gaze), 2024
Indian ink, charcoal spray paint and salt on paper
207 x 107 cm

Dawkins’ work addresses the state of diasporic negotiation between heritage, nationality and cultural assimilation by fracturing narratives and reassembling them into new forms. Dawkins embraces ambiguity and hybridity resisting straightforward interpretation. Rather than presenting a clear statement, Dawkins’ installations and images convey atmospheres of diasporic life: dislocation and longing, but also creativity and synthesis. Crucially, Dawkins infuses his exploration of identity with a sense of personal narrative that speaks to universal themes. In My Ghostly MRI’s his own family or community histories of loss become windows onto global Black experiences of grief and survival. The MRI portraits in that series, abstract as they are, stem from personal bereavement yet engage collective trauma of the Middle Passage.

Untitled (Phantom Gaze), 2024
Lapis lazuli, indigo, Indian ink, charcoal, salt on paper
204 x 151 cm

Ritual in Practice

Another key dimension of Dawkins’ practice, highlighted in the interview, is his engagement with spirituality and ritual. Far from operating in a secular or purely conceptual mode, he frequently invokes spiritual themes and even enacts rituals as part of his art-making process. In fact, he describes each work as stemming from his ritual, underscoring that creating for him is a performative ritual act imbued with personal spirit. he appears to consciously harness this by infusing his process with meditative or ceremonial aspects.

During each public viewing of his work, Dawkins gives a spontaneous vocal performance, bridging the gap between ancestral memory and contemporary audience. By channeling the song Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, which originated among enslaved Africans in the US, he invoked the spirit of diaspora ancestors and the lingering pain of displacement. The performance functions as a cathartic ritual for both the artist and viewers. he creates such communion through ritual acts like this, allowing art to serve as a healing medium connecting past and present, self and community.

Detail of My Ghostly MRIs work.

Spiritual motifs also recur in the content and titles of his works. The artist’s interest in transformation is inherently spiritual: the idea that materials, selves, and stories can undergo metamorphosis is akin to a belief in alchemy or rebirth. his’ manner of guiding the audience through the exhibition feels like a ceremony. Through this he does more than explain by forging a human connection, as one is drawn to his manner of speaking, the shared wonder of the audience, the space in itself. The almost sacred created as a result at these events indicates that he functions as a kind of artist-shaman in the gallery, using storytelling and presence to activate the works’ meanings.

The fusion of African ritualism with contemporary art aligns with a lineage of Black artists who foreground the sacred and sci-fi. Dawkins’ work is not overtly science-fiction, but his interest in “worlds they never told you about” and the ancestral “inner space” situates him in a broader move to reclaim animistic imagination in art and engaging viewers on an existential level. It speaks to the hunger for meaning beyond the material, where ritual and myth have re-emerged as potent tools for knowledge building and re-enchanting the world.

Untitled (My Ghostly MRIs), 2024
Lapis lazuli, indigo, Indian ink, charcoal, salt on paper
204 x 151 cm

Performance and Performativity

Building on the above, it is clear that performance is not just an occasional facet of Dawkins’ work but a fundamental mode through which he operates. In the interview, he reflected on how adopting performance personas allowed him to navigate different cultural spaces and tell stories that visual art alone might not capture. As Jimmy Rage, a poet-musician alter ego, he has staged multimedia performances, remixed, and projected. This conscious performativity serves both as a personal outlet and as a critical strategy. By taking performance art into theatres and music venues he extends his reach beyond galleries, emphasising that his diasporic creativity defies the silos of genre. It also recalls the Caribbean performance traditions of masquerade and carnival (where adopting personas is a way to speak truth under guise), a lineage that undoubtedly informs his approach to persona and spectacle.

Femi Dawkins performing his poetry for a friend at his studio in London.

We see a kind of performative resistance in how Dawkins uses voice and movement. His live singing discussed earlier, and his use of spoken word and storytelling are examples. Audience accounts from his exhibitions note that he performs his ideas, through poetry and personal anecdotes. This transforms the typically static exhibition format into a dynamic, time-based experience. It also means the full significance of Dawkins’ practice emerges in the interaction between artwork, artist, and audience in real time, an exchange, beyond an object, an animism of sorts.

Dawkins leaves his bodily “signature” in works like My Ghostly MRI’s activated by his singing presence, and the title itself (MRI) hints at seeing inside the body, almost a metaphor for revealing the artist’s inner self. And his melding of sound and visuals creates what can be termed a total artwork experience. These comparisons show that Dawkins is part of an emergent wave of Black artists who are not constrained by any single medium, instead using performance in tandem with object- and mark-making.

Untitled (Phantom Gaze), 2024
Lapis lazuli, Indian ink, charcoal, salt on paper
220 x 150 cm

Contemporary Context and Comparisons

Femi Dawkins’ practice emerges at a time of heightened visibility for artists of the African and Caribbean diasporas, and it contributes meaningfully to contemporary critical theoretical discourse. Curators such as Okwui Enwezor paved the way by insisting on a global contemporary art that includes postcolonial perspectives, and exhibitions like Rites of Passage (Gagosian, 2023) – in which Dawkins participated – explicitly centre the complex identities of Black artists worldwide. In that show, themes of tradition, spirituality, and place were highlighted, mirroring exactly the axes along which Dawkins works. The concept of “triple consciousness” noted in the exhibition text situates him alongside the other included artists as interlocutors between worlds. He creates from a place of culturally specific experience while also addressing universal human questions (loss, longing, transformation) that cross all kinds of boundaries.

In critical discourse, Dawkins’ work converses with ideas of global consciousness, a term encompassing Pan-African thought, the Black Atlantic, and transnational solidarity movements. The late 2010s and 2020s have seen a resurgence of this consciousness in the art world, especially post-2018 when events like the Dakar Biennale and the Black Lives Matter global protests prompted renewed interest in Black histories and futures. He work contributes to the transformation of debates on the sense of self by introducing hybridity and transculturation into the conversation by constantly mixing cultural references such as Euro-American, Afro-Caribbean, and beyond into an original idiom. His creolisation of content is where new identities and aesthetics can emerge from the contact and collision of cultures.

Untitled (Phantom Gaze), 2024
Lapis lazuli, indigo, Indian ink, charcoal, salt on paper
270 x 151 cm

Femi Dawkins’ art practice represents a rich confluence of material experimentation, diasporic identity exploration, spiritual inquiry, and performative energy. Through a theoretical lens, we can see his work affirming the non-linearity and hybridity of identity, asserting a Glissantian right to remain complex and opaque. Through the lens of material culture, we appreciate his almost shamanic ability to turn mundane or symbolic materials into conveyors of deep narrative, effectively giving voice to matter in a way that demonstrates new materialist thought. In terms of performativity, Dawkins demonstrates how art and artist coalesce: his performances activate his works, and his very persona becomes part of their meaning. Each piece he produces is simultaneously an object and an event.

Dawkins’ contribution to contemporary art lies in how seamlessly he weaves together these threads to address pressing themes of our time, speaking to the historical wounds of both involuntary and voluntary displacement and the resulting diastral longing, yet it also projects an affirmative presence with the use of beauty and gesture. He is a practitioner who produces compelling visual works and can engage communities through interaction and discussions, fulfilling an educational and experiential remit that we increasingly crave. Aesthetically, his works are layered and visually striking; intellectually, they are enriched by concept and theory; and culturally, they carry the depth of real histories and lived experience. Each piece is a story of living contemporary history.

In a broader sense, he embodies the future of contemporary art in which boundaries between disciplines are porous and where artists act as cultural mediators and storytellers. His practice, as analysed here, sits comfortably in scholarly discourse yet it also remains deeply grounded in a personal voice. This navigation between theory and practice, concept and soul, is perhaps his greatest strength. As the art continues to expand itself, his work offers both an authentic voice from the Caribbean-African diaspora and an innovative artistic vision that is ritualistic, intellectual, challenging and enchanting.

Femi Dawkins portrait in front of two works from Phantom Gaze, 2024