The personal and the political have always intersected in my work. I was raised in Jamaica during a time of extreme political and social unrest. I am also of mixed race and have had to negotiate the social consequences of my mixed heritage in my life and in my work.
My art making practice reflects my curiosity about my place in the world and the necessity of negotiating between the different cultural, social and geographical places I inhabit. (Being neither South Asian nor Anglo-Irish; being raised in a developing country while visiting a rich one every summer; I became aware at an early age of the complexity of identity.) My work always starts with a very personal concern or obsession—some sort of trigger that expands to include a consideration, or a questioning, of the socio-political environment as a whole.
I work in a variety of media that varies with the conceptual nature of the work, the site of installation and my interest in a particular genre or technique. My work has included artist books, hand made ceramic tiles, video installation, sound pieces, photography, and lately, electronic sensors and other digital techniques. I am very interested in the intersection (some would say collision) between digital technologies and traditional art making practices.
I have always been interested in the idea of artists working within a community both in the broader sense of the community at large and in the narrower sense of a community of artists. In my role as faculty member at Ryerson I have been on the board of the Ryerson Gallery and, with Robert Burley, a coordinator for the Kodak Lecture Series. I was also a member of the board of Gallery TPW for a number of years.
Though much of my work begins with a still or moving image (a photograph, a video) very often the integration of that image in the three -dimensional space of an installation becomes an essential part of the final piece. It is important to me that my work is interactive in the sense that I create an immersive environment in which the viewer must move to fully appreciate.