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I am a London-based multidisciplinary artist. With my work, I try to bring forth narratives of black trans women’s lives, particularly our interior lives, across the past and present, all so that trans people, specifically black trans women, will be able to build their selves up in ways I and other women living now could not. I always say I make work for black trans people in the future. I write, recontextualise images, draw out figures from the archive, and produce sculptures from historical imagination.
When I realised making art came easier than anything to me, when I realised how much pleasure it gave me. I must have been about 16 or 17. Before that, I wanted to be a psychiatrist but I was encouraged to explore painting and drawing by an art teacher at the school a couple of years earlier and really enjoyed it. But it wasn’t until sixth form that I really sat down and asked myself which path would be best for my heart and soul that I realized how much I loved the researching, questioning, and experimentation art-making allowed.
Slyvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Martine Syms
I’ve always been a curious person, prone to questioning, mistrustful of authority, and dissatisfied with most accounts of the world. I think growing up I really needed to know why violence was occurring and allowed to occur. I am a migrant, I moved to the UK when I was 11; I am queer, and I am black. These factors pushed me to do a lot of reading the moment I was able to about common sense, about how we ended up with the world that we have, how we’ve come to the identities that we either take up or have placed on us. My work comes out of all that reading and questioning.
I work across several mediums so it’s not the easiest question to answer. I think I’m known for my performances and my collages. With my collages, I work with found still and moving images. My physical collages are made with paper, Mylar, and epoxy resin. So maybe… I’m interested a lot in the production of images, how they in turn produce emotions, narratives, and ideology and how they can be rejigged to tell stories about/of trans women. I also work with archival fragments or fragments of history, I build them into stories and images. I try to bring forth these accounts of black trans women into the world in diverse ways.
Probably anything depicting and/or made by black transwomen from before the 16th century. There are images and objects depicting Gala priestesses from the 25th Century BC in Ancient Mesopotamia, Galli priestesses from 2000 years in Greece, and Rome (there was a grave uncovered a decade or so ago in York, UK) so I’m sure somewhere there is a depiction of African persons we would now call trans but due to a combination of colonisation, historical theft, and virulent queerphobia those objects are nowhere to be found. Someone needs to go into the archives and find these objects!
I am most proud of my ongoing research project into the life of the enslaved African trans woman, healer and sex worker Vitoria. She lived in 16th century Azores and Lisbon and was kidnapped from Benin in modern-day Nigeria. She attracted the attention of the Portuguese Inquisition, who sentenced her to perpetual imprisonment as a rower on the King of Portugal’s galleys. In her trial, she stated that there were women where she had lived who had bodies like hers, gesturing to an alternative gender system and way of relating to the body.
The outcomes of this project have included a theatrical performance Vitoria: Buraco, which premiered in Dublin in April 2024 as part of the LIVE Collision Festival. Developed using the transcripts from her trial, and scholarship on her life, the performance centres on my relationship to this archive and what it means to find Vitoria. Taking place between Benin, Lisbon, my bath, dream space and the hole in the sky, the story of Vitoria was told in a non-linear narrative using monologue, movement and sound.
I also created an installation, ‘General Partition: Precursor [Vitoria] Arrangement’ at Hannah Barry Gallery. This work was an enclosed octagonal space separated from the ‘world’ by PVC strip curtains, which had the left hands of different transwomen and trans-feminine people in my left printed on the surface. In this space were two altars, abstracted from the altar at the Oba’s palace in Benin. One emitted sounds that Vitoria might have heard or made whilst in Lisbon, the other held items that were mentioned in the court trial: orange peels, bread and honey, a red ribbon, and stones.
I’d love to produce another film, perhaps feature-length, about Vitoria, or maybe another black trans figure from deep history. And I also want to begin producing works that speculate on the future of black transwomen.
