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 and oceanic histories. I’m interested in applying ways of knowing from within my Creole heritage, and within my own experiences to the question of how to hold my own history and the history I share with the communities around me. My practice is a research methodology, a form of community building and a creative expression.

My writing and published research has aimed to advance current knowledge on the early history of the Seychelles and Indian Ocean island networks, trace diasporic connections and meaning through underwater cultural heritage and explore Creole understandings of saltwater origins. I work primarily voluntarily within my local coastal Black, Brown and Diaspora community on creative projects surrounding our oceanic and underwater and cultural heritage, but also provide historical consultation for documentary makers and museum curators, provide educational workshops and speak on topics such as Indian Ocean middle passages and ancestral voyages, traditional Creole music, mermaids and water spirits in Indian Ocean (and Atlantic) mythologies, slave ship wrecks, oceanic cultural imaginings, diasporic adaptions of Creole ways of knowing and being, and my own work.

In my artwork and creative collaborations I make use of historic documents and artefacts, shells, marine debris, portraiture, creative writing, sculpture, street art, sound and music played on traditional Creole instruments. Some of the organisations I’ve worked with include the National History Museum and Archives of the Seychelles, the University of Mauritius, the Centre for Research on Slavery and Indenture Mauritius, the University of Kent, Telesesel, the Zanzibar Stone Town Museum, People Dem Collective, Rise Up Residency, and the Turner Contemporary Gallery.