James is an artist working within sculpture and performance. He is interested in how Blackness creates distinct conditions of understanding time, materiality, irregular knowledge systems, and embodied memory. He explores this by using methods of walking, site interventions, mapping, and found as well as chosen objects.

Quiet as It’s Kept: The Rupture, The Container

A new work which uses the vernacular building practice of cob making as its foundation. Mud, which makes one of varying cob components along with soil, hay and water, has been collected within the area of Tilbury Bridge in Kent, one of many routes taken from the Caribbean to the UK. James considers whether time enforces drastic material changes in the Black experience, or if Black collective memory and the nautical catastrophe can be thought of as a temporal freezing (however, still subtly moving), overriding or establishing its own mode of time as we know it.

The work was made with additional support from Koumbah Semega-Janne and Naima Hassan.