all things related
a personal story told through images and words
2020, a moment of time that felt like the world was being forced out of it’s chrysalis, a new world unfurling from a state of half sleep, cracking it’s knuckles, ready to move. The pandemic, the death of George Floyd and the waves that rippled out into a seeming awakening. The energy was high, the fear was high, the pain cut deep.
This story is a personal one, told through images and the making of them, it pulls together parts of a collective family history, women uplifting women through art and collaboration, intergenerational shifts in roles and expectations. I wanted to photograph my work through a personal lens, a viewpoint that I had never felt able to share before.
I’ve spent time questioning why, reflecting on what it means to be a free in your creativity, who gets to experience the most freedom vs. who must spend energy contorting themselves into spaces that are not always seeking to see them in their fullness. This shoot helped me to process these thoughts, a realisation that acts of assimilation are a choice, for self-preservation, the path of least resistance (at the time) but such choices always come at a cost, shedding parts of ourselves little by little. These images are a reclamation of space.
My work is set against the aesthetic backdrop of my grandmother’s (baa’s) living, breathing home. The home that my maternal family settled in when they first arrived in the UK from Uganda in 1972; a rich and nurturing matriarchal space with 4 generations of stories, roots, ritual and creation living inside it’s celebrated pebble dash walls.
This project embodies an antidote to the culturally exclusive images of fine jewellery that represent a narrow breadth of experiences, It seeks a place where cultural pride and multicultural aesthetics can both be held.
My aim is to continue conversations and actions around culture and sustainability within the jewellery industry, women/non binary artist experiences and affecting equity through antiracism in this journal and through my work.