Peter Nicholls
Peter Nicholls is a historian, artist and musician from Margate, of Indian Ocean Creole origins. His work explores a creolised oceanic heritage formed by the merging of trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean-world histories in the Seychelles islands, now experienced in the new coastal environment of the Thames Estuary.
He questions how we can discover, hold, and relate to such diasporic, colonised and partially lost histories in creative, reparative and community-centred ways. In approaching a past that has to be imagined as much as discovered or remembered, Peter’s methods blend marine archaeology, archival research, oral histories, musical and spiritual practices and personal/cultural memory with creative imaginings explored through art, literature and music. In his artwork, Peter makes use of historic documents, artefacts and marine debris, and explores portraiture, sculpture, creative writing, storytelling and music played on traditional Indian Ocean Creole instruments.
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