Dead Dad Book

We had been searching for a project, we wanted to work differently, and we wanted to challenge ourselves. Although everything we do is in some way a continuation of what has been made previously, most of our work is made as a one-off, to be viewed in isolation. We had on occasion made small collections based on a single theme but we wanted a substantial project that we could spend more time on, to develop ideas across several objects and be shown as a collection that told a story as a whole.

It was late 2018, I was thinking about my father Michael Anthony Lindo, reminded of him by the 70th anniversary of the journey from Jamaica to England of the troopship Empire Windrush, and all the awful news stories about the struggles people were still facing.

My dad died when I was 16 years old, not that I or my family knew anything about it. We had not heard from him in years − one day he had just disappeared and we never saw him again. Seven years after his death my eldest sister discovered where he had been.

I hoped the art project would help me to answer some crucial questions around the death of my father and to learn how Windrush and migration affects people today.