I am a British-Trinidadian multidisciplinary artist whose work examines the enduring social, cultural and economic legacies of colonialism. Growing up in post-independence Trinidad, I came of age within a society negotiating the formal end of empire while continuing to live within its structures. As a mixed-race woman of African, Chinese and European ancestry, I was shaped by the contradictions and complexities of that inheritance, and it is from this lived experience that my practice emerges.

My work begins with historical research, but I do not seek to illustrate history. Instead, I work with materials that carry its traces. Sugar, hessian sacks, Reckitt’s Blue, salvaged timber, Victorian wallpaper and vernacular architectural forms are more than materials; they are repositories of memory, labour, trade and value. Drawing on Ann Laura Stoler’s notion of imperial debris, I use these remnants to investigate how colonialism persists beyond its apparent ending, embedded within landscapes, economies and everyday life. Through these materials, I trace the afterlives of empire: the wealth accumulated through extraction, the bodies and labour that made that wealth possible, and the inequalities that continue to shape the present.

Much of my practice focuses on the relationship between materiality and power. Sugar, for example, is both a substance and a historical record: a commodity that generated immense wealth through the exploitation of enslaved labour. In White Shadows: Presence and Resistance (2015), I cast Barbadian chattel houses in caramelised sugar and suspended them within the gallery space. Although sealed with acrylic lacquer, the houses slowly transformed over time. Their metamorphosis became a metaphor for lives shaped by colonialism: the outward form remained intact, while internal processes of adaptation, resistance and self-definition continued unseen. In this way, mimicry became not compliance but a strategy of survival, resistance and self-determination.

Questions of remembrance, visibility and repair are equally central to my work. Stitching Souls: Threads of Silence (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2024) emerged from research into Liverpool’s civic collections and the wealth generated through the transatlantic slave trade. The installation commemorates the 133 Africans murdered during the Zong massacre of 1781 through 133 individually quilted sculptural heads. The act of stitching continues a process of healing and reconstruction first developed in Ar’n’t I a Woman!, where I used thread, fabric and the fragmented body to explore histories of gendered violence, resilience and survival. Created from African textiles, cotton wadding, cowrie shells and hessian, each figure rejects the historical reduction of human beings to property, reclaiming the dignity, individuality and humanity of those murdered during the Zong massacre. Installed in dialogue with portraits of prominent Liverpool merchants connected to the Zong syndicate, the work exposes the relationship between civic grandeur and colonial violence, revealing how one was built upon the other.

Across sculpture, installation, textiles and printmaking, I create spaces where suppressed histories can be encountered, questioned and reimagined. Through processes of stitching, layering, casting and reconstruction, I explore how memory resides within materials and how the debris of empire continues to shape contemporary life. At the heart of my practice is a commitment to remembrance, repair and historical reckoning — an insistence that what has been obscured, forgotten or silenced can be acknowledged, honoured and made visible.