Primary and Secondary Video Creator
‘Walking in tandem with the river has always been a spiritually transformative experience where my connection to bodies of water and community intersects at the heart of my creative work. My art of walking as a practice is an act of connecting and reclaiming space, for wellness and re-connecting to narratives of memory, re-memory and healing This liquid history flows as a continuum which synchronises the past, present and future connects all of us as a global conduit that carries our stories.’
Remiiya is a multi-interdisciplinary Artist where walking in tandem with bodies of water is deeply inherent to her creative, socially engaged practice. Throughout her lived experiences, she has held a long deep fascination with the spiritual essence of the river, in all of its forms, processes and tributaries. She communes with and responds to this timeless resource from an immersive multi-sensorial perspective and witnesser to infrastructural change. This experiential, immersive, multi-layered adventure includes the river’s forever changing palette of scent, sound, colour and surface in correlation to memory, colonial and post-colonial narrative themes, industrial change, heritage and the natural environment.
She engages in the art of walking as an act of journeying towards an immersive and re-embodying meditation, in motion. She channels, explores, and creates her responses to these complex, multi-faceted inter relationships and juxtapositions through her tributaries of drawing, photography, writing, design, making and social engagement. Some of these socially engaged collaborative experiences are shared through conversation and connection with visual narratives created through mapping, wayfinding and placemaking, for a diverse range of audience from an intergenerational perspective.
She is guided and directed by Timehri, her model ship on a ‘journey of discovery, reclamation and re-memory to emancipation’. Following her successful Creative Research Fellowship, at the National Maritime Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich where Timehri guided her to explore the presence of black and indigenous women at sea within maritime history. Remiiya was particularly interested in bringing to light the hidden, omitted and unrepresented voices and stories of these women to make them fully visible as part of this canon. This creative and ongoing research journey continues which led her to curate her first one woman show as a ‘living map’ installation titled ‘Rhumblines’ with Timehri at the helm, at Making Space, Aberfeldy Village, London. She was also invited to deliver an illustrated lecture as part of the Art Salon series, at Queen’s House, Royal Museums Greenwich, which also featured Timehri. Remiiya also works on the Historical Enquiry programme with the Learning department at Royal Museums school’s programme delivering a range of sessions focusing on sensitive histories: the Transatlantic Enslavement trade, Migration and Empire. She has designed and led a series of walks for the Totally Thames Festival and contributed as part of a panel for ‘Found at the Water’s Edge’, Royal Museums Greenwich.
She recently co-facilitated a collaborative workshop for the Renaissance foundation and the Royal Collections for the exhibition: The Edwardians: The Age of Elegance, King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. Participants were invited to explore, record and map their experiences of this exhibition, with a focus on the connections from this period of Empire to the objects from India. She also designed and led a series of exploratory and research walks and workshops for heritage trainees in collaboration with Thames Festival Trust, public walks Fitzrovia Noir for Trinity Buoy Wharf and primary students for a range of schools for The Line.
Instagram: @remiiyariverambler