JOURNEY MERCIES
Spanning continents and crossing thresholds, Journey Mercies is a sculptural installation composed of over one hundred hand-painted cardboard boxes, each a vessel, a portrait, and a metaphor. Exhibited internationally across institutions from The Bomb Factory Art Foundation in London to Scope Miami in the United States, this work quietly commands space with its modular monumentality, offering a striking meditation on displacement, migration, and the unyielding architecture of community.
Measuring 40 × 40 × 40 cm each, the boxes form a constellation of lived experiences, painted with the faces of migrants whose identities resist erasure. Here, the humble cardboard box, ubiquitous in global commerce and impermanent by design, becomes a proxy for the migrant body: shipped, stacked, labeled, handled, sometimes mishandled. It is a container not just of goods, but of memory, longing, and possibility. Each box holds a past, a present, and a future; a life paused mid-transit, crossing oceans and borders in search of new ground.
Drawing from the personal and the political, Journey Mercies invokes a collective narrative of survival and reinvention. The boxes are arranged anew at every exhibition inviting curators to act as community-builders. This shifting form speaks to the fluidity of diaspora, the adaptability of the displaced, and the power we hold to shape our own environments. Though these structures are often built in isolation, they rest firmly on one another, echoing the interdependence of those who migrate not only for hope, but from necessity.
The work is an ode to those who leave and to those who stay, to the fragility and resilience of African and diasporic existence shaped by colonial aftermaths, broken systems, and resilient dreams. Despite the precariousness of the journey, what is constructed remains: stacked high, filled with values, supported by those who came before, and bearing the imprints of those still on the move.
Created through a residency at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London.
