As a curator, writer and image maker, I act as story-teller. I am interested in exploring untold, suppressed, repressed or misrepresented narratives, the processes of emergence and potentials held within contemporary art as both catalyst and conduit.
The reasons why some narratives become our ‘History’ and others don’t tells us much about power and how humans speak to or silence each other. Through the local, individual, familial, societal, generational or transnational, I am particularly interested in Queer voice within larger narratives of diasporic, colonial and legislative shift.
I draw on past experiences of work in different contexts: community curating post-lockdown, researching and leading Tate Britain LGBTQIA tours, extensive published writing for education sectors in UK and Nigeria, commissioned journalism for international charities and as a school leader.
Research/writing: I am exploring where identity self-editing/codification enables survival through political repression and what happens if that repression ceases. In the historical patterns created through such phenomena as Polari, Stamp codes, hidden Queer presence in our art institutions and by reconsidering archive (BFI) for project exhibitions and written submissions, interviewing artists and curators for zines/submitted works, I find stories to tell.
This intersection, where marginalised Queer voice may support or contradict the ‘Progress Narrative’ of the latter 20th/early 21st centuries is my my starting point. I am interested in the hows and whys: how Queer strategies of resistance can flourish within flux and why there is a pattern of such marginalisation in the majority-narratives established afterwards.
In the Across RCA Justice project, I was able to explore this in both historical and contemporary contexts within a group. The Hush Collective was formed to create ‘The Sound, The Code, The Hush', a zine exploring coded language that asks what happens if a group says 'no' to power, when it learns to subvert and to speak when silenced.
Aside from Polari, I explored Quipus, Letter-locking, Queer and non-Queer written, visual and spoken codes. I focussed on processes of evolution, what codes need and who they exclude.
In starting a new digital collage and short film-making practice ('Rise of the Cosmic Eros', 2024, pictured) I am exploring narrative repression/emergence further. My starting points are notions of Queer utopias and fallen regimes, repurposing archive image alongside the new. This is inspired variously by the ShTAB collective, Jasmina Cibic, Pauline Boty and the writing of Alexandra Kollontai and Jose Esteban Munoz.
I am interested in such responses to power because of the role narrative control played in my own start in life: acceptable adaptations, replacement truths, foisted revisions. I am not attempting to curate my own experience here but I embrace the curiosity it has given me to look for the story and to tell it well.
