A lot of the time I use photography to sort of
think through the sort of things that
I've been reading about
It’s very therapeutic and it gives me a way to
negotiate the horrific things that I've been reading
It gives me an opportunity
to be able to
like educate people on the things that
I'm reading about through imagery
I think I dabbled in landscapes at one
point and it just didn't, it didn't work at all
I just found portraiture kind of told a story
I forget almost I'm looking at myself
I'm just sort of looking at an image and
I think that's how I've sort of learned
how to appreciate my body because I'm not
looking to like
get rid of my stretch marks or, like, my
back rolls or anything because it's all
part of what I'm talking about
One of the things that struck me about the
Napoleon Bonaparte series was just
yeah these women
obviously didn't want to be in these photographs
They were sort of just posed
in a really artificial way in a foreign
country where they were being put on display
The photos are taken in the Botanical
Gardens in Paris
These women have sort of been posed to kind
of like stage this exotic scene
A lot of, sort of, ethnographic and
colonial photography was spread around
as pornographic material
but it sort of bypassed all of the
censorship that other images might have gotten
The images were deemed, like,
educational imagery
I think I'd read so much about, like, the
lack of agency behind these kinds of images
Me then
making the decision to
place myself in front of the camera and
take those pictures of myself
I think it was sort of like reclaiming that space
When people look at my images I think
I'd want them to just be curious to know
where everything's come from
I think I quite
would like for them to work as
like a visual access point to this history
because a lot of the stuff that
I'd looked at I'd only ever read in, like,
academic books and it was very
inaccessible, the language was
really hard to read
I think it's, like, very important to have
accessible information about this history because
I think one thing
that I find quite important about my
process is that
every element
within the image is something that I've
actually photographed
Normally I use plants so I'll go to the
Botanical Gardens and photograph some plants there
It’s just a really nice process just actually walking through
the gardens and having like a nice day out
and not just being cooped up in the studio
I might create some props as well
So I made some
tusks and I've made some manilla
and some like headdresses and stuff
And then I'd photograph all of those
like elements separately
My mum sends me up fabric from home
it's all sort of Nigerian fabric
and yeah I'd photograph
that like hung up separately
to create the background for the image
And then as I'm also photographing those
backgrounds I'll look at the sizes of
them to see if I could make any sort of
quick, like, outfits for
the actual shoot of myself
I photograph myself, I'll photograph just
like various different poses
I’d have researched
imagery to go along with that so might
take some poses from like source material
I think I was drawn to her specifically
just because I was looking a lot at sort
of this idea of, like, Black inherited
trauma and negotiating that trauma and
she is
like a motherly figure
In sort of like Afro-Cuban religion she’s
been sort of like conflated with
the Virgin Mary
The collaging aspect of my work was actually
a happy accident
I can create whatever I
want to make, I'm not sort of working within
limitations of the space that I’m working in
Photography’s just given me a way to
sort of negotiate my own history and
learn about my own history, and my own culture
I don't ever want to be defined by that history
There's so many more things about, like,
Black history and Black culture
that are there to be celebrated
The images I'm making are not just about that history
like it’s about me, it’s about Black women as a whole
it’s about Black people as a whole
I don't think
my work, myself, or just Black people in
general should really be defined by the
trauma that we’ve gone through