4 Years in Dreamland was an exhibition held in Margate’s Quench Gallery, as a celebration of works by myself and the two other People Dem Collective resident artists, Jas Dhillon and Geoffrey Chambers, created in the 4 years that the community group held space in disused offices at the Dreamland Amusement Park. The above images are selections of my work including finds from the archives – extracts that refer to the 12 previously unrecognised slave ship wrecks that I’ve traced to Thames estuary waters; a film projection that documents a journey of scuba and wreck-dive training as well as explorations by boat and community rituals of remembrance and reconnection for the ships; my orignal archival artwork – 24 Souls; my sound work A Song from Below and an installation entitled Lemurian Portal. The installation is made up of drawings, maps, inherited objects and a shrine to the ocean spirit known as Ampelamananisa, Lasiren or Yemaya. It is a space set up to connect with my own ancestors and those passed on who I’m trying to maintain community or family with. It includes a set of portraits from my series ‘Drawing On and Out of Things’, as points of connection to individuals through objects they owned marked with their images in charcoal. Portraits include my teacher of musical heritage Norbert Salomon drawn on the traditional Indian Ocean drum, my first mentor of history and archival research, Tony Mathiot, drawn on a scattering of photocopies from the Seychelles Archives, my grandmother in her prayer book, and my great grandfather who is remembered for a sea crossing in a tiny rowboat, on his oar. The space is inseparably a shrine and a diasporic domestic living space. The threads of scattered shells throughout the room have been collected in the Indian Ocean and Thames Estuary by myself, my father, grandparents and great grand parents. Some have been donated by friends and community members in Margate from their family homes as items brought from places of origin in the Caribbean. Some were bought from the ‘Shellman’ – the Seychelles’ most prolific and respected shell collector and reef diver drawn inside the clam shell. The maps are re-interpreted 19th century sketches of ‘Lemurian’ islands, Lemuria being the name of a mythical underwater realm in the Indian Ocean that colonisers used as the collective name of the ‘minor dependencies’ of Mauritius – the Seychelles, Chagos and Rodrigues islands. They are re-drawn according to Creole myths and oral histories of the sea-scape and water realms. Viewers are invited to sit, greet the ancestors or read the poetics – a curated selection of poetry, philosophy, history and novels that represent an oceanic, archipelagic, diasporic and Creolised way of seeing, thinking and being.

See more here: https://www.quenchgallery.co.uk/current-exhibitions/4-years-in-dreamland-geoffrey-chambers-jas-dhillon-peter-nicholls