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(Left Image) Delta Ruff – A costume to mock Elizabethan laws that forbade so-called ‘lower classes’ from wearing the ruffs and finery they made for their masters. At Timespan’s Salt and Silver Festival 2025, I made a ruff from Nigerian kente, dried herbs and broom fibres. I wanted to crown domestic labour, rather than imperialism, as the true channel for cleanliness, nourishment and safety, from which we go on to live and discover ourselves.

I covered my neck in coral and brought the smell of solstice herbs with me to obscure the boundaries of my body, the water and natural world around me.

This weekend I brought a small thread of the Niger Delta to the North Sea, in the weekend of the Summer Solstice to read poetry about the invisiblised care work of black carers, for a wider programme which honoured the Helmsdale Herring girls.

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