Art for Ancestral Waters
Foyle Rooms
Join us for an insightful talk delving into the connections between cultural and personal relationships with the sea with historian, artist and musician, Peter Nicholls.
In this talk Peter will discuss his creative approach to understanding oceanic migration, displacement and creolisation and how his work, drawn from Indian Ocean Creole traditions to recognise and reclaim traces of these histories from ‘beneath the surface’ of Margate’s dominant narratives of the sea.
Peter will share examples from his recent personal and collaborative work exploring ship routes and wrecks, diasporic mythologies of ancestors, mermaids and sea spirits, and trans-oceanic musical traditions that reach from the Margate sea into the saltwater histories of the trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean-world.
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.
