SECOND SKIN

is an ongoing act of excavation — an intimate negotiation between memory, body, and material. It moves within the shifting landscapes of migration, colonial inheritance, and belonging, seeking to trace the wounds that history inscribes upon skin and fabric alike.

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At its centre lies Olubugo, a traditional barkcloth harvested from the outer fibres of Uganda’s fig trees. Its making is a choreography of force and care: the rough bark is beaten with wooden mallets until it transforms into a supple, breathing surface — a textile that has dressed bodies, wrapped the dead, and marked ceremonial thresholds for centuries. 

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To approach this material is to enter a history my ancestors were once punished for honouring. It has taken me ten years to begin. The delay was part fear, part distance: fear of touching silenced narratives, and the reality of returning to Uganda each time the cloth was exhausted, each journey marked by longing and sorrow.

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SECOND SKIN unfolds as both a personal and collective healing. Through working with Olubugo, I am seeking a language beyond speech — one where fabric remembers what words cannot hold. The cloth becomes a threshold: between body and history, between wound and repair, between erasure and persistence. In its fibres, I search for a space where what was once fragmented can begin to be imagined whole again.