Journey Man (2025) is a personal visual memoir exploring the relationship between Scotland and the paper industry in what was colonially known as British Central Africa. The piece follows a recorded conversation between the artist and their grandfather, David (known within the family as Sekuru) who worked as a labourer at Mardon Printers, the largest printing press in colonial Rhodesia.
The work traces the movement of a Scottish paper-milling company, Davidson Mill Mugiemoss of Aberdeenshire, from its founding in 1796 through to its 1950s expansion into Rhodesia via Umtali Board and Paper Mill. It sets this industrial history alongside the personal history of one family, asking what it means to inherit the residue of empire not as an abstract historical fact but as something folded into a name, a trade, a working life, and a bloodline.
The piece is structured as a timeline, moving between two registers: the corporate and colonial record (dates of incorporation, partnership agreements, mill openings and closures, adverts for skilled tradesmen) and the intimate record of a single life (a grandfather’s birth, marriage, decades of labour, and eventual retirement). By placing these two timelines in direct visual dialogue, the work asks where the industrial machinery of empire ends and the personal and familial begins, suggesting that the two were never really separate.
The title carries a double meaning. Sekuru is a labourer, a “journeyman” in the traditional sense of a trained worker moving through his trade. But the word also gestures to journey as inheritance: the passage of empire’s effects across geography, generations, and family lines, and the artist’s own journey back through archive and conversation to recover a hidden history.
Delineate brings together text, image, and poetry from a group of writers, artists, and curators exploring the entangled colonial-era trade in cotton, linen, jute, and paper in and through Scotland.
Delineate is edited and curated by Natalia Palombo, Kayus Bankole, and Tiffany Boyle, and produced via a partnership between Many Studios, Kayus Bankole, and Mother Tongue. The book is available through Good Press, Glasgow, and directly through Many Studios.