Masked Memory, 2025

Solo exhibition at Canberra Contemporary, Canberra, 17 October 2025 - 24 January 2026

“Go there to know there. Water brought us here.

Water can carry us back.”

— Jeffery Renard Allen , 'Water Brought us Here'

Masked Memory explores race and cultural identity through the artists’ blending and contrast of West African and Australian experiences. Cast bronze railway spikes reference manual labour whilst intertwined with chilli, okra and ground nut (peanuts). Orange wax print fabric creates a new mask whose imprint is taken from a traditional Sierra Leonean Gongoli mask and lengthened with Australian cockatoo feathers. As Allen writes

How easy the past is. Flashback. Photograph.

Chronicle. Ledger. Scrapbook. Scars. Calendar. Family tree.

Husk or shed skin. Eulogy.

…

We roll through this world longing for ancestral connection. Half above the earth, half under it. Double consciousness. Africa and Australia. Old World and New. The white keys and the black keys. (Music is everything. A love supreme.)

This exhibition navigates identity through a tactility of feeling. Questions hover around diaspora and how culture and memory might change in the face of loss. Are we whole or do we exist as a gathering of fragments across history, labour and cosmos?

Link to full catalogue essay of Masked Memory ‘Water Brought us Here’.

Tears of Orpheus, 2025