Title: These Times, It Is

Artist: Kazvare Made It

Artwork Description: This work reimagines an 1831 painting of Black girlhood by Emma Jones, a rare example of Black childhood centred within European portraiture. The original resists the distortions typical of the period, attending closely to African hair texture and including a book that signals literacy and interior life at a time when both were routinely denied.

Into this image, the phrase “it’s not that deep” is introduced. Casual and dismissive, it sits in uneasy tension with the weight of the image, exposing how Black life is often minimised even as it remains structurally overdetermined.

The background situates the work in Peckham, built from a collage of hair shops, wigs, and fragments of the high street. Hair here becomes both aesthetic and economy, entangled in questions of ownership, labour, and circulation. The prevalence of non-Black ownership in these spaces, alongside recent violence against Black women within them, underscores the fragility of belonging. These tensions unfold within a wider context of gentrification, where Black cultural presence is simultaneously consumed and displaced.

Medium: Printed as giclée prints on 100% cotton rag paper.

Size: A1