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.

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.