Marcia Swaby is a British-Jamaican jewellery artist and researcher whose practice brings contemporary making into dialogue with Indigenous Caribbean material histories. Working from a diasporic position, she draws upon museum collections, archival research and studio experimentation to examine how museum collecting practices and colonial histories have shaped encounters with Caribbean cultural objects.

​

Her current research centres on Taíno objects and guanín, an Indigenous Caribbean alloy of gold, copper and silver valued for its sensory, social and ceremonial qualities. Through alloying, engraving, object-making, moving image and digital processes, Swaby investigates relationships between material memory, touch, light, sound and contemporary Caribbean identity.

 

Through close material study, Swaby uses making to think with historical forms, surfaces and material presence, while recognising that their original meanings cannot simply be recovered. Her work creates contemporary encounters with Indigenous Caribbean material cultures and asks how histories of making, exchange and cultural memory continue to shape the present.