Conversations Over Tea, 2020 – Ongoing

My ‘inward’ state of being dictates recognition of being Trinidadian, black within for the large part an indo-afro society, subjected to vagaries of multiculturalism without any notion of an ‘institutionally racialized boot’ of oppression, a class background which afforded me the privilege of education and mobility, and now a classification as an ‘exceptionally talented migrant’. Since relocating to the UK I have been using my practice as a bridge to my (metaphorically speaking) Afro-Caribbean cousins, with whom, I feel a sense of familiarity and kinship even though we have never met… until now.

Via a series of performative, intimate portraits of people of British Afro-Caribbean heritage drinking tea, combined with frank, conversational, recorded actions I examine the similarities and definitions of what AFRO-CARIBBEAN and Britishness mean as cultural constructs, with the goal of finding a common ground that is beyond just a racialised classification.

The work in itself is expanding as through discussion I am now considering being Caribbean by extensions, marriage, blended families and being members of a diaspora of a diapsora of a diapsora.