“NOTHING IS LOST, NOTHING IS CREATED, EVERYTHING IS TRANSFORMED” Lavoisier, 1795

I am a multidisciplinary visual artist based in London.

When I was 11 a History teacher introduced our class to the work of 18th century French scientist Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, and a man whose revolutionary political belief mirrored his scientific thinking. Lavoisier said in 1795: “Nothing is ever lost, nothing is ever created, and everything gets transformed”. Today, I still find this statement fundamental to my comprehension of the organisation of the world around me.

The resonance of the ‘concept of perpetual transformation’ on my work is undoubtedly amplified by my personal experience. I have a mixed cultural background (Caribbean, German, French, and Eastern European) and have lived most of my life in a foreign country (UK), far from my ancestral homes. Issues of identity have always been at the core of my preoccupation and in my artistic practice.

In my work I am interested in considering the relation between the pairing of Identity/Change and looking at the identity of a body going through a process of manipulation. Here the notion of “body" is broad, stretching from the physical body, as a mass of flesh, bone, hair and cartilage, to the symbolic representation of a body, for example as a flag standing for a “national body”.

I start with a space

The starting point for the majority of my work develops from the encounter and exploration of a specific place; diverse examples from former projects include a chalet in the Swiss Alps (More or Less, 2005- see image in archive), a specific section of the Seine in Paris (Fluctuat project, 2000), a food market in London (Cows Are Sheep, 2005), and a room in a private house (La Chambre des Parents, 2022). I develop a relationship to the space which becomes a form of aesthetic and physical anchor, from which I produce a variety of connected satellite works, generated from my feelings towards the space (whether estrangement, longing, anger or delight etc.), the use or adaptation of materials I might find readily available “on site”, the history and narratives surrounding the site, and the observation or interaction with those who use or visit the place.

I listen with my hands

I work in an intuitive and playful way, through the repetition of gestures to let what I would call “the less obvious qualities” of a material emerge (for instance the sound a piece of paper can produce as in the Book of Towels, 2022, or the weight of a packaging tape as in Quizas, video, 2022). My process is one of trial and error, manipulating and transforming ideas and material akin to bricolage, in a process I describe as ‘listening to a space with my hands’. This process often results in the production of an object keeping a trace of its original identity but which has mutated and has seemingly acquired agency; a shopping trolley becomes the skeleton for a monstrous growth (Cows are Sheep series, 2005), or my mother’s hair extensions grow exponentially to resemble the unlikely hybridisation of a dark hair Rapunzel and a tropical fig tree (Maman Figuier, 2022).

A Beach in the Caribbean

My most recent body of work and work in progress comes from the exploration of a beach, on the island of Guadeloupe where my mother was born. It is collected and presented on this website under the title A Beach in the Caribbean.