Saturday 14th October 2017 – International Museum of Slavery
UK Diaspora (2007) by Kimathi Donkor
I was really interested to see how this map had been created from cultural remembrances and this has inspired me to look more conceptually at the topic of being separate from one’s homeland, and the issues that can be visually represented through the use of a “map”.
Donkor was born in Bournemouth, England, in 1965.[3] He has said of his background: “I was born in the UK to an Anglo-Jewish mother and Ghanaian father, but was raised by my adopted parents who were from Jamaica and the UK. We lived for a time in Zambia, Central Africa, where my adopted dad worked as a vet. I finished my schooling in the west of England, then moved to London, where I eventually settled. In the meantime, my adopted parents had divorced and remarried, so the family diversity actually increased, as Zambians also joined the party. This smörgåsbord life induced an early sense of the wondrous, and sometimes maddening, complexity of identities and histories, which, I think, has been reflected in my artworks. Precisely because I was such an intimate witness to the multiple crossings and re-crossings of stories, images and journeys from around the world.”[4]
Michelle Wright, Fine Artist 