Si Mi Yah

Before the question is even finished, I already know what is coming.

“Where are you from originally?”

It often arrives as casual conversation, yet it carries the logic of a quiet border check. The question suggests that the first answer cannot be the real one. I can say Yorkshire. I can say Bradford. I can say I was born here, raised here, shaped by these streets, this weather, this humour, this way of speaking. Still, for some people, the answer remains incomplete.

'Si Mi Yah' responds to this tension.

The title comes from Jamaican patois and means “see me here.” It is both a statement of presence and a quiet refusal to be displaced by someone else’s imagination.

The work consists of six photographs of three sitters. Each person appears twice. The first image takes the form of a passport style portrait, direct and unadorned. The second places the sitter in the familiar surroundings of the artist’s kitchen.

Within this ordinary domestic space, the sitters move through the quiet ritual of tea. Cups, saucers, a kettle, biscuits on a plate. Small details that anchor the images in the textures of everyday British life.

Stuart Hall once wrote that he was “the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea,” reminding us that what many people imagine as purely English has always been shaped by histories of empire, migration and labour.

These photographs sit within that history.

Si mi yah

Listen to the 'Si Mi Yah' playlist

This playlist accompanies the 'Si Mi Yah' exhibition. It is is a musical testimony to Black Britain past and present.

See 'Si Mi Yah' in person