WHAT MEDIUMS DID THEY WORK IN?
Both were painters but my mother has moved more into textile work and when I am making my sculptural work, I feel as if I emulate her as she never had her own studio. She would find a spot in the house, usually her bedroom or on the dining table and I am very much like that.
YOU MOVED TO THE UK AS A TEENAGER, AT THE TIME WHAT STRUCK YOU MOST?
That there was no conversation around colonialism. I was surprised by how this had been forgotten. It had been obscured as there is a convenience in forgetting: to think how one’s family may have benefitted from slavery, may have benefitted from Empire. I find it odd to think that one of my Bajan grandmother’s ancestors was a Scotsman with a family who lived in Edinburgh. That’s shocking to me that his ancestors would have had no idea he sired children in the Caribbean.
A LOT OF YOUR WORK EXPLORES EPIGENETIC TRAUMA, THE IDEA THAT TRAUMA CAN LEAVE A CHEMICAL MARK ON A PERSON’S GENES AND BE PASSED DOWN. WAS THIS A VERY CONSCIOUS DECISION?
As someone who is neurodiverse and who has a terrible memory, I think that it’s no coincidence that so much of my work is about memory because I’m always thinking how we remember and creating strategies for myself to remember. I really do think there is a way that trauma is felt in the body, where we recognise things and recognise particular emotions. And I want my work to provoke this moment of recognition so that we can feel these histories so closely. It was the time of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade when I came to Edinburgh and it was interesting to observe there were no commemorations like there had been in England.
WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS?
When we think of the British Empire we don’t break it apart to think of Ireland, Wales and Scotland, it’s very much associated with England. When we think about Scotland, we are not thinking about the plantation economies, we’re thinking much more about mercantile trade but the mercantile trade meant profiting from slavery and Empire.
And perhaps because of this idea of Independence, there’s a sort of distancing itself from collective British history but the middle men of slavery were the Scots. They weren’t the big landowners who were mainly in England but they were still a huge part of these colonial endeavours.
