Personal Shopper Zine
Personal Shopper is a satirical zine investigating the liminality of the Afro-diasporic "Third-Culture" experience in the UK. By subverting the English nursery rhyme structure and re-contextualising multicultural off-license aesthetics, the project utilises common food items as metaphors for migration, isolation, and the joy of navigating new environments, as well as navigating a world that sometimes lacks one's own cultural reflection.
Grounded in my own lived experience and primary interviews with the Ghanaian diaspora, the zine employs a "tongue-in-cheek" visual language to map the dualities of Ghanaian and British identity. Each item represents a milestone in the journey of a third-culture kid, translating complex stories of heritage into accessible, playful publication design. This project served as the conceptual seed for the themes of Aesthetic Sovereignty and speculative world-building that now drive my contemporary practice.
Through this project, I utilise illustration to evoke a deep sense of nostalgia and material memory. The strength of the work lies in its playful subversion of metaphors, addressing real-life experiences with a satirical edge that avoids being overly didactic.
I believe the "softness" of the visual style functions as a site of healing, offering a space to process and validate the more complex or painful nuances of the Afro-diasporic experience. This playful methodology has become a foundational pillar of my practice, fundamentally shaping how I represent Black interiority and the Black Gaze in my work today.
Personal Shopper marked the beginning of my inquiry into the visual aesthetics of liminality, specifically, asking what the interiority of an Afro-diasporic 'Third Space' could actually look like. Through this project, I began to explore how whimsical, soft, and fantastical elements can serve as tools for processing lived experience, moving away from conventional representations toward a style that centres the Black Gaze.
The early foundations of 'Trickster Logic' are visible here in the playful deployment of metaphor and satirical illustration to create a sanctuary for reflection. This initial exploration has since matured into a rigorous research-led practice, where I now utilise these same principles of speculative dreaming and aesthetic subversion to reconstruct identity within digital systems and reclaim Aesthetic Sovereignty.