For the past few years I have been repeating the same process: I sit down at my studio table with a piece of paper and a drawing implement. I draw a ‘thread’ that begins to travel across the page. I repeat the process over and over.

There is this constant and pressing reminder that I don’t have a family archive. I’m aware of it as people make comments about all the things that their families have held on to for generations, the photo albums that their parents force them to look through, or the fear of how much they’ll inherit.

The final creative workshop for my (be)longing Bethlem Gallery programme of events that I am curating was run by Dr Ngozi Oparah. Ngozi ran a fantastic storytelling workshop focusing on prompts related to our sense of belonging.

After a second gruelling 12 week wait after an application re-submission I’m so excited that my (be)longing project is now funded by Arts Council England.

For the second event for the (be)longing Bethlem Gallery programme of events that I am curating, artist Keith Clapson ran a collaborative painting workshop exploring how we navigate where we belong in relation to others.

The first event for the (be)longing Bethlem Gallery programme of events that I am curating was a creative workshop run by artist Jules Cunningham.

I Never Wanted You Anyway. There are two occasions where I can attribute these words to my father, that I can remember.

AI Prompt: Write a 15-line poem about familial estrangement using the metaphor of islands.

I have started re-working back into these images of island to create contour maps. Something that I find fascinating about contour maps is that not everything is revealed - layers are hidden and revealed based on depth of the land. If islands are bodies, of land, or in my case human bodies, I love the notion that different maps may reveal the hidden layers within us.

Sometimes I thought of the islands as bodies - not of land - but human. The liquid as emotions, sprawling out whilst simultaneously being contained and directed by myself. At times I found myself in dialogue with the work, asking what do you need? and waiting for it to direct me.

In my steadfast approach to avoid doing other less than joyful work, I found myself doing a bit of digging around this morning. Whilst I wait for my Ancestry DNA test to arrive I thought that I would see if I can get any information from Barnados, where my father was left at an orphanage in the late 1950s.

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.