Nude Me/Under the Skin: Unveiling our Stories, one Black NHS Nurse at a time, 2020

This July 2020 performance paid tribute to Black NHS nurses from the Windrush era onwards whose voices and stories have gone unheard. It also tied to themes in the Nude Me series used the lived experience of Black nurses wearing tights as part of their uniform as an analogy for their internalised racism. Through a public call-out, photographs and anecdotes of these women were collected and transformed into artworks that became the foundation of the live performance. In the performance, a web of tights was created that became a protective nest through which stories of these women, who contributed so much to Britain, their community, and their families, were told.  Thus, their contributions were woven into the fabric of history. And while the artwork was ephemeral, the stories absorbed continue to live with it and remain in the new works created from the tights reused from the performance.

Created and performed during the COVID pandemic, the performance held particular countenance as once more Black and POC nurses were overlooked in the praise to NHS workers, while being the most at risk.