The Kingston graduate whose 'misunderstood' art has drawn considerable interest from the art community and the press.

"People react when they hear what it's about and think I'm doing it to piss people off."

You may or may not have heard of Sarah Maple, provocative young artist and Kingston graduate currently being paraded under the sweaty lights, forced to explain herself like some dirty heathen. ‘What does it mean?’ they’re asking, ‘How could you do such a thing?’

Well, in the words of HL Mencken, “Anyone who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood” and so, we have the backlash to the satirical art of Sarah Maple, 23 years old, brought up in Sussex as a Muslim to a British father and Kenyan-born mother.

The opening of Maple’s first solo exhibition, ‘This Artist Blows’, in October drew considerable interest from the both the art community and the press. And also, it seems, from those excitable geology enthusiasts who decided to smash the front windows and doors. “I don’t expect them to support it if they don’t understand it”, Maple calmly says.

Now under 24-hour police supervision, the cracked windows and doors of the Notting Hill gallery have since been replaced. Shaken but unwavering, stood the woman behind the work.

“I was quite worried and upset. It’s upsetting and intimidating”. Death threats had come through via email and anonymous telephone calls, calling for the removal of the art work. “Most of the feedback I got was positive, though. About 70 per cent of it was really good and from Muslims who were saying they support me.”

Much of the art makes plain her inspirations and the probing of her identity, all with a tongue-in-cheek approach that not only questions religious stereotypes but also lampoons the ‘society’ into which she has recently been initiated: the art community.

One of Maple’s inspirations is Jean-Michel Basquiat, an American artist who died of a drug overdose in the late 1980s. In his graffiti art he called himself ‘SaMo’ – short for ‘Same Old Shit’ – and succeeded in toppling the established perceptions of the glittery sycophants in the New York art crowd. I can see the connection in some of her more blunt statements.

Like a collision of Banksy and Basquiat, consider ‘This is an Investment’, selling for £10,000 no less. A plain white board with only the thin letters of its title across the middle, and her name painted along the bottom.

Or even more pointedly, the simple: ‘You Could Have Done This’. The headline piece, ‘Haram’, another self-portrait in Hijab cradling a piglet, the one that seemed to get the rocks flying, goes for £50,000. Just like her art, the prices pull no punches.

Money aside, Maple stresses the intimate nature of her work, pointing out that this work is a cathartic expression all her own, and not a reflection on the wider society: “A lot of the work is very personal. It’s about my upbringing, wanting to be a good Muslim but also wanting to be a western girl.”

We talk about her upbringing in Brighton. “It’s a very white area. I went to a Catholic school and didn’t have any Muslim friends or know any Muslim people.” She tells me her eyes were opened to the Muslim community when she attended Kingston: “When I went to university I met more Muslim people and I was like, wow! And thought they were going to be really religious, but they weren’t. Just because you wear a Hijab doesn’t make you a good Muslim.”

The experience strongly influenced her subsequent work. After struggling in the first two years of her course she began expressing herself more lucidly and less pretentiously, “a good time to develop my ideas as an artist” she says. We look around at some of the results of her time at Kingston, she points out the bakewell to me, and the self-portrait wearing her mother’s headscarf with a lonely Kate Moss breast poking out. It seems a little frivolous in comparison with some of the more ominous imagery surrounding us.

After becoming Winner of ‘4 New Sensations’ in 2007, an award co-organised by Channel 4 and the Saatchi Gallery, Maple’s work went on to reach the heights (and depths) of Underground tube stations. She displayed in a number of other galleries, namely Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood’s gallery ‘Scream’.

But it is this exhibition that has drawn not only attentions across the country but also internationally. With this newfound attention, I find it hard to comprehend that all she is telling me comes from her heart, that from this experience she hasn’t become so media-savvy that she knows what she can and cannot say. I feel like she holds back some of the things she would rather say in private.

We talk about the fatigue of talking to journalists and how she feels about the repetitive nature of having to explain yourself: “Some of it feels a bit false, and repetitive. When you get a news reporter asking 'What does it mean?' it’s impossible to describe it in just a few words. It’s more of a feeling I’m trying to create.”

She does however tell me reports about the reaction to this latest work have been a little imbalanced, pointing fingers and stirring trouble. According to some articles in the press, The British Muslim Association made their own efforts to have the art removed, yet Maple refutes those words: “The Muslim council didn’t say any of that stuff. They don’t actually seem to give a crap about what I’m doing.”

“The writers of those pieces had a view they wanted to put across and did what they wanted with the story. I don’t do it to piss people off. My work’s more personal than that, it means more than that, its more intelligent than that. I have to think about my own image as an artist and I don’t want be known as someone who does things just to piss someone off. I want to be a credible artist.”

Touted as the Muslim Tracey Emin, Maple continues to make her statement. Through satire she explores the complexity of a world that tries to appease differences and separate identities rather than show them for what they really are. Her art has hit upon a moment in history when any movement against the sanitisation of religious discussion is met with severe trepidation. Even with the smashing of windows and abusive threats, she is determined. It seems for Sarah Maple, it still just hasn’t gotten weird enough. 

To see more of Sarah Maple's art visit her website.

To learn more about Jean-Michel Basquiat click here.