I’m an artist and writer working in several media depending on the ideas addressed. Paintings, drawings, videos, sound, conceptual, and written works have looked at how individuals and groups use language, imagery, and music to show the remarkable qualities of everyday experience. In the past, these works have concerned intentional communities and avant-garde groups that include Fourier’s 19th-century phalanstery, Surrealist writers, 1960s communes, Beat poets and filmmakers, and musician milieus,
including Caribbean singers and UK punk bands. All of those examples feature in different parts of “Sonic Wilderness,” a book I published in 2022. One preoccupation driving that book was the proposal that unusual, often outsider, records form an obscure sonic resistance that exposes fault lines masked by conventional popular music and the ideologies that hold it in thrall.
Recent drawings, videos, and essays are part of a research project into colonial Caribbean botany and the African plant diaspora, the more than 30 fruits, vegetables, and grains transported to the Americas during the Atlantic Slave Trade. As part of that project, I am writing on the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite in relation to concepts of West Indian folk traditions and paradigms of sound and silence in the Caribbean histories.