Yeah. I spent time in the Caribbean growing up too—my mum’s half Saint Lucian and my dad’s Jamaican. So I definitely feel I’ve been spread across many places. But I haven’t been back to the Caribbean for close to fifteen years now—really because of family drama. I have a very dramatic family. So, I’m taking some distance from that.

Yes, I’d say that kind of stretching of time and space is where I get my infatuation with impossibility—I wouldn’t even say the impossibility of a future, but of a place. I grew up listening to stories of my elders who are no longer with us or of places that no longer exist—it became this whirlpool of impossibility, because I didn’t know whether any of these things were actually true or fictional.

Probably not access. For me, impossibility is a combination of Black nihilism and Afrofuturism. I’m working towards a Black future that I know cannot coexist with the present—or even the expected future. That’s why I call it an impossible time and space. I don’t actually know what comes after the end of the world, but I know it has to happen. People ask why I’d want to push towards that if I don’t know what it looks like—but to me that always raises the question: What does the outside look like? We’re so stuck within the very tight circle of capitalism and the nation-state that we don’t know how to think outside of it anymore.

It’s not necessarily about being trapped, exactly. It’s more this knowledge that even if we were successful in escaping our current reality, it would chase us. I was introduced to Afrofuturism through listening to Sun Ra and then Drexciya—I grew up around a lot of music, a lot of techno in particular. And when I discovered Afrofuturism it all made sense: it’s about people who are searching for a new place to be unbothered and free. But today even that Afrofuturist imaginary is precluded. When I think of Sun Ra, for example, I think of his Black Planet—but now that we’ve explored and colonized space we cannot imagine a Black Planet being out there. Or, with Drexciya, there’s the underwater nation of the Drexciyan people. And now we’ve got billionaires fucking exploring the bottom of the sea—so all these spaces of a future imaginary are impossible, closed off. There’s no way to escape, the expansion of the capitalist system is always going to drag us back.

We’re actually discovering all of the unknowns, yes. What were once considered really ‘out there’ ideas of escape have very quickly been brought back to reality. The only way of escaping this reality is by doing the impossible, which is destroying it. I just read this book by Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror, which is hugely depressing. But I really think it hits the nail on the head in terms of this. Warren is just straight up like, “in order for the State to survive, it relies on Blackness being nothing, but in order for Blackness to become not-nothing, to become something, it relies on the obliteration of the state.” For me, he’s the OG Black nihilist. I actually find him really hard to read because it’s like, “We’re all going to die. Freedom doesn’t exist, babe. Emancipation? No.” It’s true, but it’s so depressing.

There’s this really important moment when he’s talking about the concept of freedom, and he tells this story of a freedman having an interaction with a white guy. The white guy says to him “You’re a slave,” and he says “No, I’m a freedman” and he shows his papers. But the white guy grabs the papers and eats them and then says, “Who says that you’re free now?” I think that is so on the nose, in terms of constructed reality.

Given the current structure we live under, yes, but I don’t think the world has always been like that. I think it’s a modern phenomenon from the past 400 or so years. The best analogy I’ve found for today’s society is the slave ship: we’re being held below deck and we know that even jumping overboard or being thrown overboard is futile, we’ll just be recaptured. So, in order to prevent being recaptured, we have to destroy the system. We have to destroy the ship itself. I actually just read Dear Science by Katherine McKittrick. It’s basically the reason why I’m doing this research right now on dead weight—which I’m applying to the idea of destroying the ship from within. If you can’t escape, if surveillance in society or on the ship is everywhere and there’s no way of becoming invisible, you have to destroy it from within. And if we don’t destroy the entire thing, we’ll continue living in a cycle. I guess I don’t really believe in societal reform!

But the thing is, society isn’t broken. It’s functioning as it’s designed. It’s working as it was designed to work since day one—which means, of course, that it doesn’t work for people like us. I guess that’s why I’m enchanted by this idea of the impossible and this idea of complete destruction. It’s why I’m more of a nihilist than a pessimist.

It’s huge! I often have this problem with curators who’ve only seen photos and then contact me wanting to include my work in a show. I’ll say to them, “You need to tell me how big the space is” and they’re like “The space is huge, it’s four meters.” And I have to tell them, “Yeah, well, the work is eight meters,” and they’re like “What the fuck!” Small, for me, is two meters. I work on a big scale—and it’s heavy material too. We’re talking hundreds of kilos. It’s a work of extremes, it’s very fragile but it’s also extremely heavy, extremely large—there’s always this sense that something’s going to crash down on you. I like that tension.

It will, with time. The idea is that I let the work retain autonomy. All the iron is untreated, so the atmosphere will eat away at it and, one day, in decades or centuries, it will collapse. The white material in my work is water soluble, so any moisture that’s introduced to it essentially melts it away. I have this romantic idea that the work should return to the sea one day, because then everything except the iron would disappear.

I’m basically a medium.

All of the materials are purposely destroyed up to a certain point and then re-configured. It becomes a battle between the materials from there. I made this one piece and you could actually hear the work ripping in the studio because the tension was so high—when I heard that, I stopped and thought: “Well, that’s the work then. I can’t control it and it’s just going to keep ripping itself apart. It has to remain like that.” It’s why I don’t have a studio assistant actually, because whenever I start working with someone, they see my process they think I’m fucking insane. But that’s how I create tension between the fragility and the weight—so that the viewer feels they have no power over these objects. Sometimes because of the weight and balance, if it’s hanging, it’s almost as if it’s breathing—it starts to slowly spin in space. They’re very bodily, in a way. It’s why I really enjoy being a sculptor: being a mediator as opposed to a creator.

I’ve always gravitated to music, it’s very rare to see me without headphones on. Traveling, walking down the street, in the studio, there’s always music playing. I can shut off part of my brain that way and allow the work and music to flow together—I have specific playlists that I listen to in the studio when I’m producing, for example. It also helps give me access to a lot of heavy theory that I read, freeing me up to respond to it in a less intellectual, more physical way. I listen to a lot of Detroit techno, a lot of jazz, a lot of hip-hop, everything from pre-2001 Busta Rhymes to Drake and Rihanna, to Underground Resistance and Little Simz. It’s kind of all over the place, but I feel they’re all telling stories that feed into my work. I remember I was listening to Busta Rhymes having just discovered Black accelerationism and I was like “Oh, Busta Rhymes is absolutely an accelerationist!”