As part of my time in Rome I visited Naples on a quest to see Caravaggio’s works and the ethnography museum.  My fascination with eroded frescos, this appearance of ruin, seemed to draw so many parallels with the ideas of memory, loss, belonging and associated vulnerabilities. The eroded half-visible scenes seems such an apt analogy and the idea of making a grand contemporary fresco seemed further and further away from the solution I was seeking to consolidate my work and honestly address the ideas or the imagery I was exploring. Mainly childhood pictures of my father’s family including some of whom were never known to me. This visual ambiguity seemed to fit with the position of the communities documented in the work dispersed by migration, often visibly ‘other’ and not truly belonging in one space.

— Sikelela Owen