This research examines how painting can critique Britain’s role in suppressing Caribbean Black resistance during 1969-74, using Information Research Department (IRD) records as source material. The IRD operated secretly within the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, producing unattributable propaganda. 

 Caribbean Black Power is a ‘queer pier’ to move off from, illuminating divergent paths that centre trans liberation. Central to this methodology is ‘trans fabulation’, prospecting for those departures that might lead to alternative outcomes moving towards Black embodiment. ‘Embodiment’ here is contextualised by Black, queer and trans scholarship, such as Keeling’s ‘modes of embodiment’ existing outside of systems of ‘property, ownership, dispossession, white supremacy, and misogyny’. Snorton is cited to see transness as ‘a movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival’ and Blackness as a signifier of ‘an enveloping environment and condition of possibility’.

 This research includes two exhibitions, Unattributable Briefs: Act One (2022) and Unattributable Briefs: Act Two (2023). The name references IRD records; referring to the ways that government secrecy creates an environment where ‘decision-makers come to think the situation resembles a game’. The first exhibition highlights Black resistance in Bermuda and Trinidad & Tobago during 1969-71. And the second exposes British government operations, calling into question the complicity of The National Archives in continuing the suppression of this history. 

There is a dominant narrative regarding the withdrawal process and Caribbean independence. However, these records expose Britain’s drive to hold power through colonial influence, legislation and covert operations. In contrast, activists were striving for self-determination in nations freeing themselves from empire. Can painting create an alternate archive, embedding the aliveness of the history into the work, evoking a visceral reaction upon sight and mirroring the first experience of the archive?