Fragments Of Belonging: The Final Stretch...

Month 6

For months now, this project has lived in fragments. Filming in harbours and streets.
Recording voiceovers in a quiet studio with the WiFi switched off. Learning how to edit in Premiere Pro, sometimes patiently and sometimes through gritted teeth. Discovering, almost unexpectedly, how moving image and spoken word can sit together and hold something that painting alone cannot.

At times it has felt expansive and outward looking. At others, intensely personal.

Now it is drawing together.

In the studio, finishing touches are being added. Small adjustments to paintings, highlights, edges softened or strengthened, audio cleaned,  transitions tightened.

Alongside that, the practical things are happening too. Frames are being confirmed, submission images prepared, the hang considered,  the unglamorous but necessary details that carry work from easel and edit timeline to exhibition wall and auditorium screen.

The preview screening of the 30min film will take place on 31 March in the auditorium at Rosehill Theatre in Whitehaven. The exhibition itself opens on 24 March and runs until 24 April.

Seeing those dates written down makes everything feel real. For so long, the work has existed in my head, on my hard drive, on the studio walls. Soon it will sit in a public space. That always brings a mixture of pride and vulnerability.

This project has taught me more than I expected. Not only about belonging and migration, but about storytelling,  about how poetry can carry historical weight without closing down questions,  about how film can create tension and pause in ways that surprise even me. I did not set out thinking I would fall in love with filmmaking, yet here we are. The process has opened a new language in my practice, and I can already sense it will not be the last.

The exhibition will centre the triptych, with the film shown alongside selected paintings that form part of my own portfolio of works. Together they explore belonging not as a fixed conclusion but as something layered and lived; geographic,  historical, social,  interior.

And this is not the end. Antigua still sits in my heart. The third part of the journey is waiting. If this first chapter has been about Whitehaven and Cape Coast, the next will carry the story further across the Atlantic. The questions are not finished. They have simply taken shape.

As March approaches, I find myself holding completion and expectation at the same time. There is satisfaction in bringing something complex to resolution. There is also curiosity about where it will lead next.

If you are local to me in Whitehaven, Cumbria, and would like to attend the film preview on 31 March, tickets are available via Eventbrite:

I would love to see you there as this work steps out of the studio and into conversation. The making of this chapter is nearly done. The journey itself continues.
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