Captured Africans
A permanent public sculpture on Lancaster’s St George’s Quay, Captured Africans is the first UK quayside memorial to enslaved Africans. Using steel, Perspex and ceramic heads/tiles, the work confronts the city’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and honours the thousands of African lives taken through it, turning a site of departure into a space of remembrance, visibility and resistance.
Mother Said
Moss Side, Manchester – Public Sculpture
Mother Said is a public sculpture in Moss Side, Manchester, honouring the strength, care and everyday wisdom of Black mothers who hold families and communities together in the face of racism, poverty and neglect.
Created while I was a member artist of Black Arts Alliance, Mother Said was formally opened by Benjamin Zephaniah, whose presence affirmed the work’s poetic, political and communal intent.
Drawing on my Jamaican family history and the experiences of Black women in Britain, the piece centres the figure of a mother not as background support, but as foundation: the one who sees the danger, carries the history and still insists her children walk with their heads high. The form and surface echo my clay head practice – expressive, tactile, marked by impact and survival rather than polished perfection.
Mother Said is both portrait and testimony: a visible refusal of silence in a neighbourhood too often pathologised, and a reminder that behind every “resilient” child is someone who has already paid a cost to keep them alive, fed and hopeful. Placed in public space, the work invites touch, conversation and memory, asking viewers to consider whose labour and love remain unrecognised in the stories our cities tell about themselves.
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