My mother was the master of the kitchen, controlling who had access and ultimately what and when my Dad and us four children ate. My first tastes came from the dishes she cooked and the drinks she made. Her skills, knowledge and experience had been finetuned from cooking as a young woman for her mother and siblings in the Caribbean to cooking for her family in England. At the centre of this installation as shrine is my late mother’s Dutch Pot that is sealed with her cooking tastes, and uses the material culture of Caribbean migrant diasporic food and cooking culture to evoke/invoke memory, the senses and sucking the chicken bone as well as questions about health, loss and legacy.

Michael McMillan is a British born writer, playwright, and artist/curator of Vincentian migrant heritage. His critically acclaimed The West Indian Front Room (Geffrye Museum 2005-06) led to Van Huis Uit: The Living Room of Migrants in the Netherlands (Imagine IC, Amsterdam 2007) and A Living Room Surrounded by Salt (IBB, Curacao 2008) www.thefrontroom.org.uk/ His recent play The Good Person of Sezuan (Trenchtown) will have a Midlands tour UK in autumn 2012.