Research

The central argument of Laws of Folk is that folklore is not decorative, it is legislative. The beliefs, rituals, stories and embodied practices carried through Afro-diasporic culture form a body of law: a way of moving, remembering and surviving when official structures refuse to hold you.

This research strand examines the theoretical underpinning of the whole project: what it means to read carnival masquerade, stick fighting, steel pan, the Jab Jab figure and oral tradition not as cultural colour but as encoded information, as the legal and moral architecture of a community that had to build its own.

The mask in Afro Caribbean carnival tradition is not concealment. It is transformation. To wear the Jab Jab is not to hide, it is to become something that has permission to move through the world differently. The mask grants the wearer access to a register of behaviour, speech and presence that the unmasked body cannot safely inhabit.

This strand of the research follows the mask from its West African origins through the Middle Passage and into the carnival traditions of Trinidad, Jamaica and eventually the streets of Notting Hill. It examines what the mask carries, what it protects, what it demands of those who encounter it, and how it functions in Myers' figurative work as a visual and conceptual device rather than an illustrative reference.

The Jab Jab specifically, the grease covered, chain rattling carnival figure at the centre of Pay the Devil, is studied here as a figure of controlled transgression: one who moves through the crowd demanding something from those who have more, in a ritual frame that makes refusal difficult and compliance meaningful.

Before Caribbean communities had access to paper, institutions or official record, they had rhythm. The drum was the original archive, a technology for storing and transmitting information that could not safely be written down, that needed to be felt in the body to be fully received.

Steel pan, invented in Trinidad in the 1930s, is the continuation of that tradition through new materials. The pans themselves were built from oil drums discarded by colonial industry; the music played on them encoded community, identity, and creative authority in the same gesture. Myers' engagement with the Metronome Steel Orchestra, one of the UK's first steel bands based in Kensal Road, and with the Mangrove Steel Band at The Tabernacle in Notting Hill, roots this research in a living practice rather than a historical one.

Between the Beat addresses this directly, the body that carries sound as the body that carries memory, and the relationship between both in the construction of the Laws of Folk series.

Myers' research has included time in Trinidad, engaging with Carnival, masquerade, Jab Jab and Jab Molassie traditions, stick fighting, steel pan, sound, movement and cultural inheritance. A further Trinidad and Tobago research phase, supported by the Westway Trust International Artist Bursary, is planned for the end of 2026 and will extend the project beyond the London exhibition.

The visit was not tourism. It was primary research, fieldwork in a cultural territory that the artist's heritage connects to but that the artist had not previously documented at this level of sustained attention. The photographs, recordings, sketches and field notes from Trinidad form the material foundation of the Laws of Folk body of work.

The relationship between field research and the finished work is not illustration. Myers does not document what he finds and then draw it. The research is translated, passed through the formal language of the studio, through sustained mark making on large scale paper, through the layering of collage, ink and charcoal until the image finds its own logic.

This translation process is where the faces within faces structure of the work emerges, the hidden forms, the masks within masks and the figures that can be found in the dense mark making only through sustained looking. Material decisions remain specific to each work, shaped by the demands of the image rather than by a fixed formula.

This research strand documents the studio practice itself, the methods, materials, scale decisions and formal choices through which the cultural research becomes image.