The fuel that have kept me engrossed over the years of exploring project 5am has been that this fleeting moment was the first time that I had experience the state of “being” in its purest form. “Before” that my perception of being had stemmed from my parents culture which in turn came from my surroundings that I grew up in. Being black British of the last of the first generation of the wind rush that came to the UK meant that my childhood was lived through the late 80s 90s. My football team was Liverpool F.C mainly because my favourite player was John Barnes. I saw Liverpool play Birmingham city in 1995 and I was in the city and I always remember when the game kicked of and Barnes got the ball a voice from behind me bellowing “get the black bastard”. A guy next to me said ignore him he’s an idiot but inside I was raging but at the same time powerless. Being in a minority back then meant you had to take it. I was always on the fringes of things. At school I was the only black kid in my year in a mainly Asian culture then in my late teens when moving to London. I was living in a Black culture with a mainly Asian background. This has become a great advantage for me because I got to see cultures from a different perception which opened up my mind to a lot of things but at the time it was hard because I felt I was fitting into other peoples worlds and not my own. When I found a passion for video editing and working in the postproduction field without a degree I felt once again on the fringes of people that had been to uni. I would of gone to uni before but a the time I didn’t have a subject in mind to study and after dropping out of a few college courses before doing an access course in multimedia I had decided to work from the knowledge I had gained. The interest in sound and video came from the advice that I got from my best friend my sister who told me to do the thing you love. She had an interest in art but our parents talked her out of pursuing it. Their fears came from their own experiences and not wishing it one their own children. In his early years my father had hope to be a writer but life for him at the time didn’t give him the doors to go through with that. So for them playing safe was the best option with a career in computers or business. One of the legacies from slavery has been a subordinated mindset, which is slowly being eradicated from generation to generation.Larger groups accelerate that process but the African diaspora have reduced those larger groups so visible racism or more importantly invisible racism has hampered the individual from knowing their pure true being. In the recent films “The Butler” and “12 years a slave” the common theme in both film was how the black person were shown with their heads down when within the company of their masters or employees.
In the late Nelson Mandela’s moving inaugural speech it included the quote:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?. as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
What my five am peak experience did for me was to let myself see the totality of myself in the universe, which was beyond form, color, and gender. A way of being that was exclusively mine and not filtered by history or the cultural surroundings that I was bought up into.
From this base, my output comes from how I see the world from my eyes which was one of the reason why I choose explored project 5am via a fine art degree as the artist creates works from their own observations in how they see the world.
Realtime movie: short film made in conjunction with Polish artist Pawel Althamer for Tate Modern featuring the actor and star Jude Law, alerting people to a live performance event at Borough market
