Works

Artist Note

They called us devils.

So we became them.

The Jab Jab is one of the oldest and most spiritually charged figures in Caribbean Carnival tradition. Born in the years following emancipation, it emerged when formerly enslaved Africans took to the streets at dawn, covered in oil and molasses, draped in chains, horned and blackened, mimicking the devilish image their oppressors had assigned to them. Not in shame. In satire. In reclamation. In liberation.

The chains they wore were the chains they had broken. The devil they played was the devil that had been used to diminish them, now turned back on itself as a symbol of freedom. Every gesture was an act of defiance dressed as performance. Every step on the road was an assertion that the grotesque label had been reclaimed and transformed into something nobody could take away.

This work does not illustrate that tradition. It inhabits it.

The sacred and the earthly, the elevated and the raw, are held inside the same image. Jab Jab has always contained that contradiction. The grotesque that is actually holy. The devil that is actually free. The mask that reveals more than it conceals.

The devil was their word. This is ours.

Artist Note

This is not a portrait of Mary Seacole.

It is a portrait of what she carried.

The work considers care, endurance and Caribbean presence within histories of war, empire and service.

It holds Seacole within a wider language of inheritance, visibility and historical repair.

Artist Note

This is where the language began.

Jay is an earlier work. A study. The piece in which the practice found its footing and began to understand what it was trying to say. It is here because the full body of work would be dishonest without it. You cannot understand where something arrives without knowing where it departed from.

Through this piece, the practice began to understand expression, contrast and shadow. Emotion arrives before explanation. The face is caught in a moment of intensity that is also sincere.