Created as a site responsive installation at the inaugural 'Critical Edge Collective' exhibition at Safehouse 1, London, this work layered my own family histories in the city with broader cultural narratives of immigration and belonging.

 

Two images taken from my family archives, one of my Great Grandmother and one of my late Aunt, are manipulated through a process of printing, painting and erasing, creating spectral figures that hint at the fragility of memory. Individual light-bulbs hang in front of each image, reinforcing a sense of memorial. 

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In dialogue with the images, the 2-channel sound installation combines field recordings of city sounds with warped and twisted samples that create a bed of ambient textures over which two samples play a prominent role. In the left channel, an Irish folk song is sung by Mary Delaney, a folk singer who emigrated to London from Ireland with her children as my Great Grandmother had in the 1920s. In the right channel, a muffled sample of a dub record by Mad Professor and his band Robotiks - Mad Professor (born Neil Fraser) was born in Guyana in 1955 and arrived in London as a child just as my Aunt did.

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The music was chosen for the work in part for the parallels in the lives of these musicians and my family members, but it also relates to my interests in dub and folk music as modes of cultural memory transmission. Dub music, much like folk music, is a tradition of taking songs from a cultural past (near or distant) and modifying and renewing these songs to have a relevance to the contemporary moment. Contemporary dub records still reference back to early reggae music which has cultural significance in the Caribbean, much in the way that Delaney changes the lyrics to a traditional folk song dating back hundreds of years in the Irish culture in order to reflect her living conditions in 1970’s London. ​​​​