More black out poems from conversations about my heritage and father’s adoption.

For about a year or so I’ve been making work in all manners about islands: inks, drawings, writings.

I am the son of a Black man adopted by white people. The circumstances of my father’s adoption is still somewhat of a mystery to me, simply because no one will tell me the truth.

For the last couple of years I have been increasingly curious about unpicking my family history, including tracing my Caribbean heritage, or at least understanding some of my family lineage on both sides.

In early 2024 I was appointed as the EDI (Equality, Diversity & Inclusion) consultant for the British Association of Art Therapists.

In 2022 I collaborated with Dr Sarah Yardley, THIS Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, on producing a series of images that relate to her research project that explores and challenges the accepted norms in healthcare systems, using Palliative Care and Mental Healthcare as two examples.

In late 2021 I was asked by colleague’s at King’s College London to support the producing of an event focused on the arts, young people and mental health, taking place in February 2022.

In these new works I reflect on my experiences of racism at various sites of my childhood. Painful physical attacks, racist bullying at school and the experiences of my parents as an interracial couple.

I’ve been looking back over drawings made over the months which will be installed beside photographic images for my commission from the Tavistock & Portman NHS Mental Health Trust.

In the past few months I have contributed to two reports in my Arts Advisor role for The Baring Foundation.

It feels like I’ve finally hit on a methodology, a process, that I can work with now.

I’ve been struggling to be inspired recently. It happens. I decided to go back to some archive imagery and continue working on this idea of incorporating the hand drawn maps, places of significance, placed directly on to the body.

I’ve been thinking lots about roots, belonging and place. With my family home now gone, in my head I thought it would be this huge relief. As if the house no longer existed, that my ties to places and sites of trauma would be erased. Of course they're not. My real life connection to the place has disappeared, but my emotional and historical connection, and the baggage that that comes with, is right there.

I recently wrote a piece for Historic Royal Palaces about my involvement for their current exhibition George III: The Mind Behind The Myth. You can read the piece in full over on their website.

These lines are like journeys, from one side of something to another, which is how it feels doing this commission. I’m journeying across quite difficult terrain, asking myself questions that will be posed to others in a building where so many people (patients & clinicians) pass through.

Recently I was commissioned by The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust to make a piece of artwork that explores my experience of mental health services as a non-white and queer artist. The commission will be displayed in their building in north London. The project and corresponding public engagement programme is also supported with additional funding from Arts Council England.

Recently I was commissioned by the National Gallery to produce a short audio visual presentation about my work at Kew Palace supporting men with lived experience of mental health difficulties

In early 2021 I was commissioned by the Baring Foundation to produce the introduction to their report on creativity & ethnic diversity.

This personal essay was commissioned by The Lancet Psychiatry and published in their December 2020 issue.