THE OUTPOUR
ALICIA KING
"there’s an energy field that surrounds everything, regardless of if it’s this phone or that painting or us. It just shows we’re all connected ..."
HONEST EMPATH SENSITIVE
By Abigail Tucker
Alicia King is a 21-year-old artist, currently studying fine art at university. The artist speaks about how she did not grow up seeing herself in art and aims to create art that embraces black female beauty, ‘showing little black girls that they do not have to submit to a European beauty standard ’.
Alicia says that her aunt and dad were two strong familial influences in her life who encouraged her to pursue art and gave her advice. In fact, the best advice she has ever received was from her aunt who told Alicia to be true to herself. We discussed the how encouraging others to be authentically themselves has become a cliché, as if it goes without saying, but as Alicia conceded, it is still something many people struggle with. Especially within the creative industry, it is easy to compare ourselves to one another and feel like we are inadequate. But there is no one way to be a creative and Alicia is a prime example of what it means be true to herself, as her passion for black beauty and spirituality is depicted in her work.
' These two are probably my favourite works - probably because of the subject matter,I just feel really uplifted and positive when I look at them and when I was painting them. I just love nature so any of my work that focuses on that makes me feel like I’m working on a topic I genuinely think is important. '
She acknowledges how hard it can be for people of colour to progress in the creative industry and when asked about what improvements could be made, she said:
"Just more of us in high positions, because then you actually get to the root of the issue. I feel like you can get into tokenism by picking, just to show that we have representation but it's not really doing anything on a bigger scale."
As an artist, Alicia draws inspiration from a range of different places and gave me some insight on the influences behind her work. She also shares some valuable advice she has learnt on her journey as a creative about the power of the mind.
Is there a piece of creative work, (song, film, etc) that shifted your perspective on your life or your art?
"There's been a few like my GCSE project for example. The project was called ‘sense of place, sense of identity’ and I did a little bit of research on DuBois and his concept of the double consciousness. I found that concept so interesting and I feel like that’s been a theme throughout my work now."
"I'm also really interested in spiritual things so during lockdown, I watched this documentary called Thrive which spoke about the taurus, and things like that and obviously I used that one of my pieces which was probably one of my most liked photos. It’s literally of me meditating and it's a taurus. That really shifted how I look at everything because there’s an energy field that surrounds everything, regardless of if it’s this phone or that painting or us. It just shows we’re all connected. I get it's one of them cliché sayings, 'we're all connected', but we genuinely are, and it just made me look at the world in a more positive way."
If you could speak to your past self, what would you say to her now?
"To trust your intuition a lot more and to stop second-guessing yourself because then you just spiral and you don't trust yourself anymore. I’m really interested again, in the concepts of the ego and I watched this really interesting thing recently. It was talking about how a lot of the time we have a lot of self-doubt, and we literally don't realise it's literally just the ego. Things like meditation and even painting can be a form of meditation where you’re literally just focused on something; not thinking about anything else. You can quiet down the ego and try to have more control of how you think about things. What you put into the universe you can get out so, if I genuinely believe I can get somewhere with this then it will manifest."
The future for Alicia holds a lot of growth as both an artist and a person. After falling back in love with art during her gap year and then transitioning into a university art curriculum she says:
‘I'm just trying to find my feet again’.
She says: "it’s really hard to not get sucked into the mindset of 'I should be making art like that'" and hopes to become more confident in her art style as she overcomes the weight of comparison that many creatives struggle with.