I perform furniture and perhaps skulp-cher ensues or as a resident told me "she mek our stories outtah furniture ". This bed is a story of future climate change ,hurricane and past hurricane, of passage, hospitality and hostility .It has a spiralling understanding of time and maronnage. Specific to one of the UK's oldest West Indian Communities and also not. A tradition of hospitality was required of West Indians in that those that followed the first of the Windrush migrants often had to stay with earlier ones for a variety of reasons before they could find thier feet. The roll out bed was a fixture of many households. The bed opens up as a trap net or passage depending on your perspective. This bed was manufactured in the UK in Tipton and was called the Rollaway which is so similar to runaway. This work touches on many mixed feelings.

This guest bed was part of a St Kitian household in Chapeltown to provide for visitors.
The British people were not always hospitable to West Indians which meant that West Indians often had to stay with other West Indians when arriving in the UK.
This bed was manufactured in Tipton, England and called the rollaway nr 8.
Rollaway is so close to run away, and this wheeled bed looks like it is capable of both. "Running away" or the more complex maroonage is an essential philosophy to deal with inhospitable people in Africa or the West Indies.

I wondered at maronage in the UK as a tactic to respond to inhospitable experiences in Britain and if that space of marronage might be a dream space in a bed. A kind of dream will have brought West Indians to the Uk in the first place.
A dreaming space as a powerful willful place that can trap and create a passage or create a passage that is a trap were considered in the making of this work.

The folded bed open in this way is reminiscent of the mantraps that were set up around the plantations anticipating escaping slaves. The first time I encountered such a thing I was 9 and it was on the floor open and ready to snap shut at the bar in Barrett House in Jamaica. This is a work made on Commission in Leeds Chapleton.