Over the two-year duration of my 20/20 residency, I searched deep for hidden histories of workers who moved to the Black Country across centuries.
The gallery's 19th- and 20th-century landscapes — by Edwin Butler Bayliss, Arthur Lockwood, and Harry N. Eccleston — romanticise the Industrial Revolution but omit its human cost. This region powered the British Empire's global extraction. Today, as computer chips redefine technology, do we risk repeating old biases? In an age of digital systems, will overlooked stories vanish again?
To probe these questions, I partnered with software engineers to build a custom database. It combined public-domain scans from the gallery's collection with ethically sourced images of mid-20th-century empire workers. We tagged each image to train a dedicated machine learning model, which I then accessed. This tool generated new visuals from prompts drawn from my research and local stories — visions of the spaces between histories that stir my deepest longings.
The artworks, created in Summer 2024, emerge from rigorous experimentation. They fuse historical inquiry with technological innovation in the series Endz of the World, spanning multiple mediums.
Sculpture
The centrepiece of the Endz of the World exhibition at Wolverhampton Art Gallery — a Black Country factory crowned by a computer chip. The work draws a direct line from the region's industrial furnaces to today's silicon foundries, asking who benefits and who is left behind when technology reshapes the world. The sculpture has entered the Wolverhampton Art Gallery collection.
Digital Prints
Photopolymer Etchings
The photopolymer intaglio monoprints fuse the series' digital origins with tactile history. At Thameside Print Studio, I learned photopolymer etching — a process akin to photolithography, which patterns silicon chips. Each monoprint is unique.
Installation Views
Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 2025
Endz of the World — Coded Furnaces, 14 June – 21 September 2025. Sculpture, AI-generated prints and artist film.
The Works
Exhibitions
- Endz of the World — Coded Furnaces, Wolverhampton Art Gallery — June–September 2025
- Endz of the World — artist film screenings, Chelsea Space gallery, Chelsea College of Arts, London — July–September 2025
- 20/20 Group Exhibition, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester — November 2025–February 2026
- 20/20: Futures Group Exhibition, LCF, Stratford, East London — November 2025–January 2026
About 20/20
20/20 is a bold three-year programme launched by the Decolonising Arts Institute in November 2021, funded by the Freelands Foundation, Arts Council England, and University of the Arts London (UAL). It pairs 20 emerging or mid-career artists of colour with 20 UK public collections, commissioning new works for permanent acquisition.