Volta do Mar / Return from the Sea
Volta do Mar (2021- 2024)
Moving image (4K, HD, 1:78, Stereo, 18 mins), performance, broken ceramic punch bowls, antique re-upholstered chairs, Limited edition four colour (CMYK) prints.
The body of work includes a collaboration with American Jazz Artist Ruth Naomi Floyd and ceramic artist Rachel Ho.
Volta do Mar references a navigational technique perfected by the Portuguese during the Age of Discovery in the 15th century. Literally translated as “to return from the sea,” this technique harnesses the westerlies, or ‘anti-trade winds,’ to navigate ships back from the Caribbean and America to Europe. Here, it serves as a metaphor to reconsider our relationship to place, memory, history, and empire.
Filmed over two years in the artist’s birthplace of Cumbria, the work traces the dark history of Whitehaven, raising questions about the artist’s own complicity as a white British artist.
Through movement, ritual, gesture, and objects, the artist invites us to meditate on our interwoven histories in a reparative gesture—a lament towards the healing of the land.
The film is complemented by vocals and flute composed by acclaimed American jazz artist Ruth Naomi Floyd, whose great-great-grandmother was an enslaved African in America.
‘Broken Punch Bowls’ (2023), a collaboration with ceramic artist Rachel Ho.
Hand painted porcelain.
The shape of the bowls echo sugar boiling coppers found on Plantations across the Southern USA & Caribbean, whilst also making reference to English Spode blue Italian Ware (c1816). The bowls were painted by hand with historic and contemporary images related to Cumbrian colonial history and contemporary migration across the English Channel - from John Lowther who founded the port of Whitehaven in the 17th century to the town’s 18th century lighthouse, an Antiguan Windmill making reference to rum which was imported into the town from plantations on Antigua by the Jefferson family, to flimsy dinghies crossing the English channel, surveillance and the hostile environment - echoing the links between immigration, politics, colonialism, empire, memory, object and place.
The broken pieces were used as props in the making of my film Volta Do Mar.
‘Transatlantic’ repeat pattern screen print & re-upholstered Georgian chairs (2024)
‘Transatlantic chairs’ is a series of two re-upholstered Georgian chairs. The repeat pattern print references Spode Blue and White ceramic ware and incorporates images related to the colonial history of West Cumbria embedding historical and contemporary subjects within a traditional tile pattern. Images include a slave trader (plantation owner) with pipe (Whitehaven important Tobacco from Virginia and Maryland), CCTV cameras - referencing the UK’s hostile environment and sugar cane (imported into Whitehaven from Antigua.)
Limited edition prints of ‘Transatlantic’ are available to purchase in my shop.
Limited Edition Four Colour CMYK Prints…
‘LOWTHERS’
Hand printed four colour halftone screen print on Canaletto Paper
300gsm acid free archival paper
38 x 50cm
Limited edition 1/10
2025
The print references two sites; The Old Library at Lowther Castle Cumbria (home of the Lowther family), and the former Lowther Plantation, Christ Church Barbados, which can still be located via Google maps by the name “Lowther”.
As I was unable to travel to Barbados (perhaps one day) so I travelled there virtually via Google maps and walked the land around the former Lowther Plantation, which is now being redeveloped into residential housing. The old plantation house can still be seen on the map, and the long driveway flanked by tall trees marks the entrance to the plantation. Although residential homes now dot the area, sugar cane still grows wild in the fields in between building sites. My screen print overlays and merges these two sites, that of the former Lowther home in Cumbria whilst sugar cane seeps through and overtakes the domestic space of the library connecting the two places by an interwoven past.
‘BARHAMS’
Hand printed four colour halftone screen print on Canaletto Paper
300gsm acid free archival paper
38 x 50cm
Limited edition 1/10
2025
The print references two sites; Appleby Castle and Deans Valley Dry Works, Westmoreland, Jamaica (now Abeokuta Paradise Nature Park after the African village Bekuta located on the property - Source: The Jamaica Gleaner). The Abeokuta Paradise Nature Park was officially opened on January 5, 2003 by the Nigerian High Commissioner to Jamaica, it was renamed to honour their ancestors.
Following abolition John Foster Barham made a claim (registered in the compensation commission) for 144 enslaved at Deans Valley Dry Works. Barham’s UK address is registered to Appleby Castle Cumbria.
Eldest son of Joseph Foster Barham, Whig MP for Stockbridge, 1807-32, and Lady Caroline Tufton, daughter of Sackvill Tufton, 8th earl of Thanet. In September 1832 succeeded his father to estates in Pembrokeshire, Stockbridge and the West Indies. The Barham family had owned and operated the Mesopotamia estate for over a century and ‘took a special interest in their slaves’ by inviting missionaries to educate them. However, John Barham ‘never visited Jamaica and took little interest in his property there’. (Source: Summary of Individual | Legacies of British Slavery)