Here in margate it's starting with a bit of a bang this amazing banner
of protest photographs. Particularly I was looking at the photographs and thinking about protests in
the 1980s both the joyous life-affirming thing that can happen when you're going
protesting together and you're with a band of people but then there's the other side where you
come up in conflict and again the overall sense of the exhibition being about bodies moving through
space so it's fitting in with that as well but it's quite political. But also your wonderful
set of kinetic sculptures there's something about the combining the body in points of distress
and points of joy and the repetition we're talking about cyclical nature of those protests
and those ideas so it's having a kind of 3d representation of that but not totally figurative.
Some of the body shapes that are in these still images they're almost bouncing off the movement
they occupy sort of a similar sense of shape body shape whether it's being you know man
handled by the police or people who got their arms around each other in a moment of solidarity.
And we wanted to start off with this didn't we here because we had a sense of Margate and the
history of dissent here. And these are still unfortunately still things that we're having
to protest against and which are still very live issues.
And in the next gallery we've sort of brought together new works that deal
with the sea, with migration and there's a beautiful installation of flotilla
of ceramic boats they look like paper boats but actually they've been cast.
The uk is an island so that whole idea about going out from this small very small island to
the rest of the world and historically what that's meant in terms of claiming and imperial history
and the fact that you know I come from a huge continent, South American continent but
that idea of repelling and welcoming the shoreline and it's echoed by the way the waves go out and in.
Then there's the installation 17 of 68 which is based on a long term research project you
did around the black figure in everyday life in britain so how it appears in some of the most
incidental and ordinary environments. Yeah those some of those images are from pub science from
architectural features and the representations of the african in different landscapes around the uk.
There's a tension in that room and people bring their experience of black people
and representations of them to it. The title of the show is carbon slowly turning
and you've always been fascinated in geology, in the south gallery there are four monumental works
made actually with digital photography. My interest in photography started very early my
father lent me his first 35 mils something that absorbed me and you could easily do it at home.