The Greater Number paintings are an intended play on the idea of ‘minorities’. I adopted the narrative of Gulliver’s travels, as I believe the black individual’s position in society as a spectacle mirrors the position of a giant amongst tiny people who turn him into an object of curiosity, fear and political manipulation. Gulliver’s size in lilliput turns him into a spectacle- both fascinating and controllable. His stature is futile in a society of small-minded people. Similarly, Frantz Fanon describes how colonialism reduces Black people to their physicality, making us hyper-visible yet dehumanised, much like Gulliver’s exaggerated presence in Lilliput. This narrative itself brought Paula Rego’s use of scale to distort power dynamics to mind. 

These are some of my largest paintings and I played with the proportions of the figures in the through sketches to produce a distorted surreal reality within the world of my characters