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Contemporary Art Practice (MA)

Daisy Jones

Still of super 8 film where we see the artist emerging from the sea, wearing a foil blanket

Daisy Jones is an artist, filmmaker & writer from London. Since graduating with a BA in Fine Art Photography at Arts University Bournemouth she took part in SLG film school, a radical film programme with guest tutors including Blitz the Ambassador & Mica Levi. Her film works have since been screened at Roundhouse, South London Gallery & Wexner Center for the Arts Ohio.

Visual and narrative storytelling are central to her practice, she often employs deadpan humour as a tool to uncover home truths within her work. While she has often used her own gaze to approach societal injustices she is also concerned with the broader aesthetics of blackness, particularly when they become untethered from Black people. 

In 2021 she was awarded a Grand Plan artist grant for creatives of colour where she was able to develop her research on the home as a space for exploring the effects of creolisation, inspired by Michael McMillan’s installation titled The Front Room.

During her Masters in CAP she has continued to expand her practice to include performance, sculpture & installation. She plans to continue to make work that focuses on the Caribbean diaspora, the theory of the other & blackness in all of its myriad forms.

Green screen image of the artist in front of a blue skied beach sipping on a carton of Ka Black Grape

My practice focusses on the relationship between Britain and the Caribbean. Having initially been drawn to the Jamaican patty as a symbol of the colonial imprint that has been left on Caribbean culture, I have since turned to other ephemera associated with the diaspora as a mode of connecting with my Jamaican heritage while accepting the limitations of this.

I have begun to take solace in Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic as a way of viewing blackness and black identity as something that is constantly in motion as it flows like the water that surrounds us in our various lands.

In this current body of work I have employed analogue filmmaking as a mode of engaging with the notion of nostalgia both in relation to the romanticising a place other from here and as a way to navigate Britain’s view of its past self. 

Through examining the colonial gaze I want to shatter the notion that the Caribbean should be viewed as a set of indistinguishable paradise islands.

Still of a Caribbean takeaway called Palm Beach shot on super 8
Still of waves hitting the sand shot on super 8
Still of two coconuts with straws on top of a bin with a bus going by in the background shot on super 8

A taste of the Caribbean (narration excerpt)

I’ve been longing to feel rooted to the place that half of me belongs to. 

To understand the warmth I feel when I hear someone speaking in an accent that reminds me of a home I’ve never been to.

On this search for home I had decided to film the cooks making patties at my local Caribbean takeaway.

I had pictured black hands tenderly kneeling dough, 

with love pouring out of them as they prepare this meal for their customers. 

but when I spoke to the owner she told me that they don’t make the patties in store and sent me instead to a factory in Wembley to uncover the true taste of the Caribbean. 

when I arrived I found conveyer belts where I had imagined hands would be.

and machines that moved at a rhythmic pace producing perfect Jamaican patties, one after another. 


On my second visit I began to see this factory as a kind of transient space.

with its machines constantly moving, 

each one facilitating the journey of the patty as it makes its way through the space before travelling to its final destination.

The off-cuts the machines produced had begun to look like waves.

or maybe I had just been staring at patties for too long.


It’s lunchtime now and the factory manager kindly offers me a beef patty to taste.

I take a bite and for a brief moment I am transported to memories of childhood, though it’s not a childhood I recognise. 

The artist stood on a beach turning towards the sea
The artist beginning to run towards the sea
The artist coming face to face with the sea
The artist has disappeared into the sea

As Far As I Could Get From England is the artist's feeble attempt at running away from England. Fed up with its hypocrisies she has decided to escape its wide reach. Though she knows the impossibility of this act she hopes that escaping the more limited reach of the camera lens will provide some temporary solace.

The artist has provided this statement in support of her decision:

If between two islands is 

where I’m from

I’m going to swim

from here to Mount Pearl 

so I can finally belong 

Paradise is just around the corner...

Enter Paradise was made for the aural branch of Beyond Surface: the RCA CAP Festival of 2023 & was hosted on Montez Press Radio.


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Royal College of Art

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