Untitled (My Ghostly MRIs 4), 2023
Indian ink, charcoal and salt on paper
42 x 29.7 cm
In My Ghostly MRIs, the concept of the “spiritual autopsy” lies at the core of Femi Dawkins’ practice. It is a method or ritual of interior excavation. Although death is a fundamental node, it explores the living traces of harm, rage, and inherited grief within the body and spirit. Dawkins approaches his making as a process of deep looking into where ancestral memory lingers as a source of compassion. This form of clinical, sacred, unflinching introspection is how he unearths his haunting visual language.
The Politics of Quietness: Quiet in Dawkins’ work is a political and spiritual gesture. His drawings reject the economy of spectacle that historically rendered Black death a form of public entertainment through lynchings, gladiatorial games, executions, and televised brutality. So the awe the work inspires in its sublime form causes an disarmament and quiet that makes us listen.
Invocation: Dawkins’ considers his practice also as an act of invocation. The marks he makes are ritualistic of washing, witnessing, and paying respect for those lives that have been overlooked. In his series My Ghostly MRIs, each smoky structural line can be seen as a devotional gesture toward the dead who were never grieved properly.
Diastral Longing: The artist introduces the term “diastral longing” to describe the psychic condition of those severed from ancestral geographies like chromosomes are pulled apart during the diaster stage. His work grapples with the consequences of human displacement and generational rupture. These longings are mapped across the surface of the paper like migratory routes, spectral evidence of lost homes and severed kinships. The quiet caused by the sublime in his works leads to a response of psychological scattering and seeking within that noise.
Deconstructing the Spectacle of Violence: In the Phantom Gaze series, Dawkins confronts the ethics of witnessing and spectatorship. Early works retain direct imagery like nooses, bodies and physical trauma, but as his practice evolved, he began to abstract the violence by going deeper. He removes the noose, then the figure itself disappears. What remains are thorns, bones, Hebrew letters, mangroves and thistles, symbols that carry memory without reenacting brutality. This shift the gaze and participation in the consumption of the spectacle of violence inwards, into the eternal, beyond physical limitations.
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Material, Form and Surface
Materials as Carriers of Memory and Extraction: Dawkins uses materials for their embodied histories. Salt, lapis lazuli, indigo, and Indian ink were commodities of conquest, symbols of labour extraction, artefacts of imperial economies of yore. Each one holds geopolitical and ancestral resonance. By applying these materials to the surface of paper, Dawkins performs an act of commemoration as part of a ritual of invocation of histories embedded in the earth and spirit.
Surface Terrain: The surface in Dawkins’ work evolves as a terrain which gradually shifts into a scarred landmass or forrest. The anatomical marks evoke arteries, tree trunks, Hebrew alphabet, thorns and bones. It is almost as though he maps internal geographies onto the surface collapsing the distance between environmental landscape and internal soulscape. The works as a result move from representation to embodiment.
Site of Incantation: In My Ghostly MRIs - which later evolved into Phantom Gaze - Dawkins found a striking recognition in medical X-rays from the countless hospital visits of several of his family members who passed during COVID. The functionality of looking inside the head and body is poetically applied as psychological scans for spiritual diagnostics. These works depict internal coagulations, clots of memory, and ancestral memories and imaginations embedded in matter. MRIs transcend identity, appearing as anonymous landscapes of the soul. Like the medical gaze, Dawkins’ MRIs - and later the Phantom Gaze works, which go deeper into the head by disintegrating the borders of its shape - map the unseeable to listen, not just see.
Environmental Haunting: Dawkins’ surfaces allude to ecological witnesses, whereby terrains of mangroves, thorns, and swamplands recall landscapes that witnessed violence and either protected or exposed vulnerable people. The land and trees become ghostly participants in historical struggle. Through soil that remembers war, swamps that enabled survival, and nature ultimately as an archive, the haunting produced by the sublime in his works is also environmental.
Embodied Encounter: Dawkins’ works can be seen as events that compel stillness, making the act of looking visceral by tuning us in—whether through aura, negative space, or material invocation. The scale of the smaller works grips our focus in psychological absorption, allowing the boundaries between self and artwork to blur. While the larger works envelop our bodies within the space of the artwork through the expansive scale, tactile surfaces, and organic textures. In our encounter, the works come alive and become embodied; bodily awareness and breath become attuned to the artwork’s undulating matter. The self feels expanded, opening up new ways of perceiving internal psychological landscapes.
Process as Ritual
Process as Wake: Dawkins initiates each body of work through a process that he likens to a wake, whereby he listens to no music but enters zone in a contemplative, sacred time set aside to honour the unnamed lost souls. Just as in mourning rituals, his process offers him a sanctuary for grieving and remembering in an act of invocation. The artworks are born out of a rapturous dance, applying the materials as baptismal and cleansing of those souls.
Salt and Water as Spiritual Agents: His work begins with an elemental alchemy of spraying water onto a combination of pigments such as lapis lazuli, beetroot, charcoal, and Indian ink. Then as if creating a potion in the rapture of making, he moves and scatters salt along the undulating matter that emerges from the spraying. For him water is drawn from memories of being baptised in Jamaica at his grandmother’s insistence in a local river before he left for the US. Baptism denotes rebirth, drowning, and grace, while salt - once a form of currency - dissolves and forms unpredictably, leaving traces that glimmer like diamonds and white crystals against the hitting light. These substances generate surface environments that resemble oceanic grooves, archipelagos, and landscapes seen from a bird’s-eye view, drone, or satellite. The surface texture of the dried salt resembles fungi that resist control and cannot easily be smoothed out.
Process as Conduit: Dawkins does not impose himself on the paper but allows himself to lose control, letting the work conjure itself through him as a conduit. He remains still and then suddenly moves when compelled, each gesture guided by a rapturous, instinctive force. His movements are determined by an emotional readiness that he cultivates through intensely conceptual investigations into themes of interest from philosophy, poetry, and history. His rhythm is slow and meditative, then frantic and uncontrollable. Drying takes days, with works becoming stepping stones to others, gradually building up. As he returns to older works, he continues if needed, elevating the totality of the works to a state of completion.
The Unconscious as Source: Inducing States of Creative Coma: Dawkins approaches his ritual of making as a state that ought to be induced, like a medical coma. He seeks to surrender consciousness enough to let the buried, the incinerated and the drowned rise. This is how the unconscious becomes accessible by entering a trance. In this space, the work commands in its own language and Dawkins embodies with reverence.
Exorcism and Healing: Haunting refers to the lingering presence of unresolved stories, memories, and ancestral spirits that permeate both Dawkins’ process and the resulting works. These are abstract ideas that are felt as spiritual echoes of ghosts that inhabit the space of the work. Exorcism then is about a ritual of acknowledgment and transformation. By using water in his process, Dawkins both honours and attempts to release the ghosts that haunt him, allowing their stories to be expressed, witnessed, and, in some sense, healed. The act of working with water becomes a way to channel these presences, to give them form, and to allow for a kind of cleansing.
Lineages, Inheritances and Counter-Histories
Afterlife of the Aftermath: The concept of “the afterlife of the aftermath” sits at the heart of Dawkins’ investigation. He draws attention not to what the eye saw, but to what the tree and the soil saw, and the grass and the salt in the air. These witnesses too are historical participants. This marks the pivot from spectacle to hauntology, from the cinematic to the elemental.
Guernica, Delacroix, and the Spectacle of Suffering: While Dawkins is in dialogue with historical works like Picasso’s Guernica and Delacroix’s battle scenes, he rejects the use violence to shock in these canonical images. His works are sublime that inspire awe by proposing a different kind of gravity, of paying respect. His larger works hit like the Guernica, but instead of depicting brutality, they emanate the silence that follows its aftermath.
Subversive Songbooks: African American spiritual songs like “Steal Away” and “Amazing Grace” are embedded in his work as references that are go beyond just lamentation toward healing for liberation of both the lost souls and ourselves. “Amazing Grace” written by a captive was repurposed as a song of freedom. His work carries this paradox.
Myth, Magic, and Reclamation: There is a mythopoetic layer to Dawkins’ practice, positioning him as a sorcerer engaged in acts of invocation and libation. His works conjure magical, spiritual dimensions of liberation. As a ritualist, offering “the sorcerer’s recommendation” to a broken space, he aligns himself with African diasporic traditions in which healing, spirit work, and resistance are deeply intertwined. Each work becomes both a spell and a portal.
Ancestral Negotiation: Dawkins’ practice advances the lineage of Black abstraction with a distinct specificity, carefully determining how to engage with ancestral memory. While many Black artists are embracing figuration, his intensifying abstractions are autobiographical, bearing witness to the lives of those who were lost without care. Transcendence comes through the blurring consciousness by drowning and collapsing within the internal matter of their ghosts.