Identity
Look Well After Yourself
Look Well After Yourself is a multiform installation inspired by child refugee archives, held in Special Collections at the University of Southampton, and the artist's exile heritage and family archive.
The exhibition comprised sculpture, photographs, archive material and online elements, including films, photographs and a radio broadcast. As a body of work, it invited the viewer into a deep zone of caring and contemplation, with a radically introverted practice.
As a child, Boué’s family lived in political exile in England due to the Spanish Civil War. ‘Look well after yourself’ was a phrase the artist’s father used whenever they parted. For Boué, it holds a meaning beyond words, as it is loaded with the emotional landscape of exile. Accordingly, her relationship to the Basque child refugee archives –– the inspiration for the exhibition –– is familiar and presents an emotionally entangled heritage.
The work can be understood through the lens of postmemory practice in relation to collective traumas (such as holocausts and civil wars) where the experiences and raw emotion of one generation are transmitted to subsequent generations. Traumatic memory is inherited and comes to feel present and real. Inspired by handcrafts found in the archive, Boué has learned to make pom-pom sculptures and conjured a space for memory, healing and repair.
Short film
Look Well After Yourself, 2024
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, One hundred pom-pom sculptures, wool, lanolin and steel.
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, One hundred pom-pom sculptures, wool, lanolin and steel.
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, Boué’s photographic response echoes her father’s pose, providing an entry point for her work.
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, Photographs from Boué’s family collection feature her father leading a group of Basque children through a series of exercises in Oxfordshire, in June 1939. When newly exiled from Spain, caring for the niños was his first job in the UK and Boué traces the callisthenics to her father’s education during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–39). These images mark his arrival to safety from the brutal throes of a bloody civil war. They seem to capture a youthful vigour and determination to uphold and pass on his vision of a free Spain.
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, Photographs from Boué’s family collection feature her father leading a group of Basque children through a series of exercises in Oxfordshire, in June 1939. When newly exiled from Spain, caring for the niños was his first job in the UK and Boué traces the callisthenics to her father’s education during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–39). These images mark his arrival to safety from the brutal throes of a bloody civil war. They seem to capture a youthful vigour and determination to uphold and pass on his vision of a free Spain.
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, One contemporary framed photograph and two framed archival photographs
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, A white vitrine containing Sonia Boué's Pom-pom Archive.
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, Pom-poms made in pale colours and a collapsed woollen form are displayed as artefacts, demonstrating the beauty and significance of process works. A tub of pom-pom trimmings has been preserved like the gut-healing pickles, sauerkraut and kimchi originally stored in this everyday plastic container. Boué’s use of lanolin and samples of raw wool, used as packing for the safe transit of pom-poms to the gallery suggest an extra layer of protection.
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, The short film Look Well After Yourself on the digital array screen at John Hansard Gallery
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, Two photographs, Boue’s sketchbook and a delicately sewn vintage postcard comprise a Lexicon of Gestures and offer a glimpse of hand-cut collage explorations.
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, Open pages of a chapter by Dr. Cara Levey on the theme of ‘militant luggage’ and Boué’s previous work on Spanish exile.
Look Well After Yourself, 2024, An original copy of Boué's father's play Tierra Cautiva, published in 1962, the year of Boué’s birth. A catalogue of Boué’s 2016 project Through An Artist’s Eye summons the antifascist spirit of the British artist Felicia Browne, who died in action in Spain on the Aragon front in 1936.