(i'm)migration

I am a Zimbabwe-born artist and cultural worker, now based in Lisbon, Portugal. My life has been shaped by movement across borders, and by the way mobility can be both a choice and a condition.

I am British through ancestry; my mother was born in Scotland, yet my childhood and formative sense of self were built and nurtured in Zimbabwe. Over time, nationality, paperwork, language, and history have all shaped where I can live, how I am read, and what “home” is allowed to mean.

The collection spans acrylic and charcoal paintings on canvas, cyanotypes, and a t-shirt design, each one asking what it means to belong when home is a pattern of crossings, not a single place.

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My history as an immigrant

My ongoing series of bird paintings is my way of thinking through this life in motion. Birds are not symbols I use randomly. They are living bodies that navigate distance, season, instinct, and survival. They carry the logic of migration in their physiology.

In that sense, they give me a visual language to speak about identity, belonging, and place without reducing my experience to a single country or a single story.

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I was born and raised in Zimbabwe. At 18, I was required to choose one nationality. I chose British citizenship because it offered wider access to global travel, higher education, and economic opportunity. That decision also meant letting go of the legal belonging of my birthplace.

Now, every time I go home, I apply for and pay for a tourist visa. This renunciation was my first clear lesson that borders are not only geographic. They are administrative systems that decide who is permitted to move, who is permitted to stay, and what forms of belonging are recognised.

Since then, my life has moved through the United States for university, then living across several countries, including the Czech Republic, Serbia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Germany, and back to Zimbabwe, before I settled in Portugal.

In between all of those versions of home, I visited almost 40 other countries as a documenting artist: observing, analysing, and questioning what makes a man become.

I have lived long enough in each place to experience the difference between being a visitor and being an immigrant. I have also lived long enough to see how quickly a “right” can become temporary.

When the United Kingdom left the European Union, I felt that shift directly. I arrived in Portugal with freedom of movement and the expectation of stability. Brexit changed the terms of my life.

Over the last almost 7 years, I have rebuilt a future in Portugal through work, taxes, cultural integration, and struggling to learn Portuguese.

I am now in the process of becoming a Portuguese citizen through naturalisation.

Diaspora, inheritance, and the politics of identity

My identity is complicated by the histories I inherited. I am a white man of colonial descent from both the British and the Dutch, who was raised in a nation shaped by Colonial rule, extraction, and violence.

In Zimbabwe, that history is present in everyday life and in how bodies are read in public space.

In the United Kingdom, my passport does not automatically translate into cultural familiarity or belonging.

In Europe, ancestry and documentation can open doors, but they can also flatten a person into a legal category.

I have learned that belonging is not a single achievement. It is negotiated, denied, performed, and only sometimes, very rarely earned.

It can arrive through language, through relationships, through shared experience, and through time.

It can also be withheld regardless of sustained effort.

Why birds?

Birds allow me to hold these contradictions without forcing them into a clean resolution. Migration is not a metaphor for me. It is a lived structure that has shaped my choices, my losses, and my opportunities.

In the bird paintings, I return again and again to the tension between instinct and constraint. Birds move because they must. They respond to climate, scarcity, and season. They carry maps that are not drawn on paper. They cross borders without passports, yet their survival is still shaped by human borders, landscapes, conservation policy, and the changing conditions of the earth.

This is where my own life sits. I have moved through systems that promise freedom while constantly reminding me that permission can be revoked. I have learned languages to be understood and accepted. I have changed my status to keep moving, and later to remain, and somehow I still feel unsettled. I have lived in the space between attachment and departure, where you can feel a strong sense of belonging, or a strong sense of place, but rarely both at the same time or in the same geography.

Belonging as motion

I have come to understand that I often feel most at home in the threshold between places. Airports, border crossings, temporary housing, first weeks in a new city, the slow process of learning how to speak and behave like someone who belongs in a place that I do not understand.

There is a strange comfort in transition, because transition matches the truth of my life.

The bird paintings are my way of staying with that truth. They are not illustrations of travel. They are meditations on what it means to be shaped by movement, and on how identity changes when home is not one place, but a pattern of crossings.

Practice

My practice moves between observation and reconstruction. I work from lived experience and from careful looking, building images through layers, line, and attention to structure.

I am drawn to birds because they demand precision, but they also carry emotional charge. They let me speak about vulnerability and resilience at the same time.

In this series, the bird is never only a bird. It is a body navigating distance. It is a portrait of adaptation. It is a record of seasons, routes, and return. It is a way to ask, again and again, what it means to belong.