Artist Database

Born in 1960, Gollifer has lived and worked in Gaborone, Botswana since 1985. A multidisciplinary artist, her own navigation of identity informs much of her work: born in Guyana to British and Amerindian parents, she spent her early life in the Solomon Islands and Trinidad before being educated in Britain and eventually completing a Masters degree in History of Art at Edinburgh University in 1983.

“This series of small heads was the starting point for an investigation into the earth pigments, the ochres and how on a technical level the different oxides flow and dry in water on paper. The idea of change was embedded in the process as changes to colour, texture and form happened as the paintings dried... transformed from liquid to layers... it was a material expression of how colours blend and change each other and for me directly referenced how human racial interaction changes our colours. Miscegenation, a word coined in the United States in the late 19 century as a derogatory term used to describe people of so-called ‘mixed blood’ can be seen to describe something of great beauty.”