PROJECTS
ABOUT
I’m a historian, artist and musician from Margate UK, of mixed British and Seychelles Creole heritage. My work focuses on Indian Ocean Creole heritage, oceanic histories, diasporic connections to underwater cultural heritage and Creole understandings and imaginings of saltwater origins.
MY PRACTICE
My work looks for creative and reparative ways to discover and hold my own history, and the history I share with my communities. I draw on ways of knowing from within my Creole heritage, and those which speak to my experiences between the Indian Ocean and Thames Estuary. Within my Creole heritage, the ocean has been an important holder of a past that has to be imagined as much as remembered.
Creolised understandings of origins and identity have long been sought, or invented, from across, within, beneath or in relation to saltwater. In my research, creative work and collaborations I’m exploring that tradition and its adaptations in a new coastal environment. My methods of reaching for the past include marine archaeology, archival research, rememberings and oral histories, music, Creole spiritual practices and imaginings in art and literature.
CITATIONS & MENTIONS
My research has been used to support other works on Seychelles history, Indian Ocean creolisation and island networks – here are a few favourite examples.
It was an honour to have my work recognised by Edward Aplers – one of the foremost historians of the Indian Ocean-world and a pioneer whose work helped open up this field in the 1960s. This is from his keynote speech to open UNESCO’s Routes of Enslaved Peoples conference in Mauritius 2025
“Peter Nicholls has substantially added to our knowledge of slavery in the Seychelles.”
