The Canadian-born, Trinidadian artist’s FREE WILL: Manifestors of Realities reimagines histories of Afro-Caribbean resistance through hand-carved wooden masks and Afro-Caribbean hair traditions.
By Bella Danso
Asia Clarke’s FREE WILL: Manifestors of Realities began with a question about how history is remembered—and who gets to shape the images through which it survives.
From Thursday 27 August to 3 September 2026, the Canadian-born, Trinidadian multidisciplinary artist will present the work at Seed Archives in London, following its debut at FUZE Caribbean Art Fair in Nassau, Bahamas, in 2025. The exhibition brings together five hand-carved wooden masks representing figures associated with Afro-Caribbean resistance and liberation, with each mask incorporating sculpted hair created by Clarke.
The series considers the lives and legacies of figures including Nanny of the Maroons of Jamaica, Cécile Fatiman of Haiti and Maurice Bishop of Grenada. Rather than approaching them as conventional historical portraits, Clarke uses sculpture to reconsider how these figures might be represented today, particularly when the archival record is incomplete or has been shaped by colonial perspectives.
“FREE WILL: Manifestors of Realities is my route to liberation,” Clarke says. “It’s my contribution towards collectively imagining homage to our ancestors and a reminder of what they stood for so we can draw strength for the path forward.”
The London presentation is supported by DēpART Consultancy, the cultural consultancy and talent network founded by Ghanaian curator Chantel Akworkor Thompson. The partnership follows DēpART’s presentation at FUZE Caribbean Art Fair, where FREE WILL formed part of What the Ancestors Whispered. The 2025 exhibition marked Clarke’s first experience exhibiting at an art fair and generated interest in a series she intends to continue expanding.
For Clarke, however, the work is not simply a commemoration of the past. Its central concern is what historical memory can make possible in the present.
Reimagining the Archive
The question of representation is particularly important to Clarke because some of the figures she depicts have no definitive visual record.
In creating masks of historical figures such as Nanny of the Maroons and Cécile Fatiman, Clarke is therefore not attempting to reproduce an authenticated likeness. Instead, she imagines what these women may have looked like and considers the act of imagining itself as part of the work.
“I’m imagining what Queen Nanny of the Maroons would have looked like, and I’m imagining what Cécile Fatima of Haiti would have looked like,” Clarke says.
That speculative process also responds to the ways Caribbean histories have been documented. Clarke points to the fact that records of figures such as Cécile Fatiman often survive through colonial accounts and descriptions. For the artist, relying exclusively on those sources risks allowing colonial perspectives to determine how Afro-Caribbean historical figures are visualised.
Her masks offer another possibility: to approach these figures through the imagination of an artist who shares the cultural and diasporic histories being explored.
“It’s important to me, as a woman of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, to actively reimagine my ancestors and be a steward of their message through my art going forward,” she says. “Not informed by a colonial master’s imagination.”
The masks consequently sit between historical portraiture and speculative sculpture. They refer to people who lived and shaped political and cultural histories, while acknowledging that contemporary representations of them are inevitably acts of interpretation.
Hair as a Material of Connection
Clarke’s use of Afro-Caribbean hair traditions is central to that reinterpretation.
Her practice has developed across costume design, jewellery and editorial hairstyling, disciplines that have informed the sculptural configurations in FREE WILL. In these works, hair is not an afterthought or decorative flourish. It becomes part of the historical and political language of the masks.
“I love using Black hair as a medium because it is so specific to Black people,” Clarke says.
For Clarke, hair can act as a marker of shared ancestry across the African diaspora. At the same time, she acknowledges the diversity within Black cultures and diasporic communities. The material becomes a way of considering both difference and connection.
The masks themselves are carved from osese wood, a pliable and soft wood commonly used for mask carving in West Africa. Clarke worked with artisans in Accra, Ghana, using her sketches and prototypes, and describes the process as an interactive and shared creative experience.
The resulting objects bring together two distinct material languages: the carved wooden mask, connected to African traditions of sculptural and ceremonial practice, and Afro-Caribbean hair traditions, which Clarke associates with diasporic identity and lived experience.
She sees the combination not as an attempt to recreate an existing historical form but as an adaptation of those traditions for a contemporary purpose.
“The extra adornment of the hair on top of the mask is not a new practice at all,” she says. “But it is one that I am adapting for the message of sharing the lived experiences and work of Afro-Caribbean freedom fighters.”
Art, Reparations and Resistance
The political implications of FREE WILL extend beyond representation.
Clarke is direct about the limits of art as a form of restitution. While the work engages with histories of enslavement, colonialism and political oppression, she does not consider artistic expression a substitute for financial reparations.
“I don’t think that art can ever stand in place for reparations,” she says.
For Clarke, reparations involve material compensation for generations of exploitation and dispossession. Art can play a different role: drawing attention to those histories, generating conversations and encouraging collective action.
The distinction is important to the series because the figures Clarke has chosen are not presented simply as symbols of an already completed struggle. Their histories are used to consider how resistance continues to operate in the present.
Maurice Bishop, for instance, features prominently in Clarke’s thinking about the political dimensions of the project. His socialist politics and opposition to established power structures form part of the wider set of histories she wants audiences to encounter through the masks.
Clarke hopes the work will encourage viewers to go beyond looking.
“I just want people to be educated,” she says. “I want people to be inspired and use that knowledge to bring up courage in themselves to fight systems of oppression in their everyday life.”
Research, in this context, becomes an act of engagement. The mask introduces the viewer to a figure; learning about that figure becomes part of what the artwork asks the viewer to do.
From Afrofuturism to “Afro-Infinities”
Although FREE WILL looks toward liberated futures, Clarke does not describe her practice simply through the language of Afrofuturism.
Instead, she uses the term “Afro-Infinities.”
The concept reflects her interest in cyclical understandings of time and in the idea that there is no final, perfect state of liberation. Even when one form of inequality is addressed, other social and political tensions remain.
“I always like to view my work through a critical lens,” she says. “If one problem is solved, what is the problematic outcome of that solution?”
This makes the future in FREE WILL less of a destination than an ongoing process.
The ancestors are not positioned as figures from a finished past. Their experiences become part of a continuing conversation about what communities inherit, what they resist and what they choose to build.
That approach also complicates the idea of the mask as a memorial object. These sculptures commemorate historical figures, but they are not intended to keep those figures fixed in history. Instead, Clarke uses them to activate questions about the present and future.
A Meeting Point Between Archive and Contemporary Practice
The presentation at Seed Archives provides a particularly fitting context for this work.
Seed, founded by British-Jamaican photographer Christian Cassiel, focuses on African and Caribbean art, design, culture, objects and books. Its approach to archival practice emphasises access, education and collective engagement with cultural material.
That philosophy resonates with Clarke’s interest in making historical knowledge active rather than static.
The masks are designed to catch attention before their subjects are fully understood. Clarke hopes audiences will first encounter the physical presence of the sculptures and then look closer, read the accompanying information and investigate the people represented.
The work therefore operates across several forms of knowledge: visual, material, historical and personal.
For an artist concerned with how histories are remembered, the setting matters. Seed’s emphasis on reconnecting diasporic audiences with histories and cultural objects creates a context in which Clarke’s masks can function not only as artworks but as prompts for further inquiry.
The exhibition also extends a relationship between African and Caribbean cultural histories that has been central to Clarke’s practice. Based between Toronto, Canada, and Accra, Ghana, and working from an Afro-Caribbean perspective, she approaches the Caribbean not as an isolated cultural geography but as part of a wider diasporic network.
What Comes After Remembrance
Clarke is already thinking beyond the London exhibition.
She plans to continue developing FREE WILL with additional masks and artefacts and hopes the project might eventually expand into a book, further exhibitions or a museum presentation. She has also imagined the series becoming an educational resource through which audiences could study the individual histories of the Caribbean freedom fighters represented in the work.
That ambition reflects the scale of the project’s underlying question.
The masks are not only about remembering people who resisted colonialism and oppression. They ask what happens when those histories are placed back into circulation—when historical figures are not simply commemorated but reconsidered through contemporary Black diasporic experience.
In Clarke’s hands, the mask becomes both portrait and proposition.
It looks backward to people whose lives shaped histories of resistance, while asking viewers to consider how those histories might inform the realities they inhabit now.
FREE WILL: Manifestors of Realities will be on view at Seed Archives in London from Thursday 27 August to 3 September 2026.
For exhibition information and updates, visit Asia Clarke’s Linktree.
