My childhood experiences have had a profound affect my life. When I was six months old my father was offered a teaching job at the University of the West Indies and my family moved from London, England to Kingston, Jamaica. Growing up there was wild and exciting. The island was full of the exotic and the exotic was normal. There were stories of Annancy, originally an African tale of a mischievous spider that spun a web to create the universe. Trees with such names as Genip or Guava or Akee whose rotting fruit we used to wage wars. I ran wild with gang of kids that came from all over the world. There were peacocks in the parks, carnivals in the streets and a beach called Run Away Bay. Rastamen lived in the hills behind our house and duppies (ghosts) lived in the huge almond tree that grew outside my bedroom window. I could talk to the birds. At ten years old my life abruptly changed when my parents got divorced and we moved to an all white suburb of Detroit, Michigan. Since then I have moved many times always living on the surface of a place, feeling restless once I’ve grasped the sense of the place I’m in. A similar sense of restless movement seems to define my work. I shift gears and change direction when I figure out the basics of what I am working on. To counterbalance this tendency I work on several series simultaneously.
My process of working reflects my belief that life events are random and uncontrollable. Unexpected encounters and seemingly unrelated coincidences fascinate me. In preparation for this statement I tried to compile a list of my influences and came to the conclusion that almost everything could be included on that list. Everything is interwoven and connected; any given thing affects any other given thing. Like words in a sentence, change the order and you can change the entire meaning. Have you ever noticed when you come across a word you don’t know the meaning of in a sentence, and, after looking it up, you see or hear it several times after that? Is this because you have never noticed the word before or because there is now some sort of pattern built up through recognition?
My process of working reflects my belief that life events are random and uncontrollable. Unexpected encounters and seemingly unrelated coincidences fascinate me. In preparation for this statement I tried to compile a list of my influences and came to the conclusion that almost everything could be included on that list. Everything is interwoven and connected; any given thing affects any other given thing. Like words in a sentence, change the order and you can change the entire meaning. Have you ever noticed when you come across a word you don’t know the meaning of in a sentence, and, after looking it up, you see or hear it several times after that? Is this because you have never noticed the word before or because there is now some sort of pattern built up through recognition?