My creative practice explores postcolonial identity and cultural performance within the context of the Caribbean, particularly the Bahamas, where I was born. Through ceramic sculpture and installation, I investigate how the legacies of colonialism and tourism shape both personal and collective identities. My work asks how material and form can embody the complex negotiations between authenticity, performance, and survival that define postcolonial life.

In a postcolonial world, one might expect servitude to have ended, but in the Bahamas, new forms of neo-colonialism persist under the guise of tourism. Writing amidst the end of colonialism in the twentieth century, Frantz Fanon described the Black subject as existing in a liminal state—pressured to assimilate to white norms for acceptance but constrained from doing so fully. This duality informs my own lens as both artist and Bahamian citizen. The tourist’s desire for an idealized “island paradise” produces a cycle of performance and concealment: Bahamians must present a version of their culture that is palatable and marketable, while masking elements that might disrupt the fantasy.

My studio practice materializes this tension through the manipulation of clay—a medium historically tied to both craft and survival. I employ techniques of fragmentation, repetition, and surface layering to reflect the process of cultural masking and reconstruction. Glazed and unglazed surfaces become metaphors for what is revealed and what is hidden. The physicality of clay, with its capacity to hold memory and transformation, mirrors the negotiation of identity under the pressures of external expectation.

I see my installations as conversations between object, history, and body. They combine ceramic forms with found materials and sound to evoke spaces that are simultaneously domestic and performative—echoes of the staged authenticity that tourism demands. Each piece questions who is being served, who is being seen, and what cultural costs are incurred in the exchange.

Ultimately, my practice seeks to give form to the intangible weight of neo-colonial influence—to materialize the silent negotiations of identity that occur when culture becomes commodity. Through clay, I strive to confront the complex entanglement of beauty, labor, and resistance that defines Caribbean existence in a globalized world.