GRIOT

A relationship between artist and clay that goes beyond words.
By Daniel Lema

Kevin Dalton-Johnson is a British international artist who explores his African and Jamaican diasporic identity through clay. His sculptures can be considered as griots, West African historians or storytellers, repositories of oral tradition. Like many others living nowadays with the affects of fragmented information about his cultural heritage, the work Kevin has created for more than twenty years stands to tell the sense of displacement he often feels. Through the cathartic making-process of one of the sculptures, the film enters a world in which clay and artist transform each other through a vibrant and powerful relationship that goes beyond words.