Sekai Machache: I was the only black child in my high school and then again, in art school, for years. So when I went to art school I initially felt like arts was this space that I could utilise to, sort of like, do anything, say anything, create anything that sort of meant something to me.  

And I felt like it was the only environment where I could express myself truly, you know, I would write a lot of poetry and I would paint and I would make music. And these were the only spaces where I could actually, really truly create this idea of who I am as a person. I started doing self-portraits and the self-portraits was like the first time that I really got to encounter myself, really truly on my own terms. And through that self-portraiture practice I was able to really look at my face, really look at the structure of it, really look at the colour and how to create that colour with paint; how it was very different from how I would approach painting a white person. I realised the differences were, they were real, they were tangible and accessible, but they weren’t actually, they didn’t really mean anything in terms of who I am as a person, because I was still just as Scottish as everyone else. I was still experiencing the same school system, the same, you know, the same country. I was still in Scotland and feeling very much like I was part of the fabric of this place.