All the work that I make, I make it for myself. I don't think about what people will think of it when they see it. And so it's not made for an external viewer in a way. But I feel like people that see it imprint their own story on it anyway, it means something to them. They'll pick up things about parents, abandon, alcoholism, and it will ring true in their own stories. So it's a shared story. In a way, once it leaves me, it has its own life. And then it moves on and tells stories to different people in different ways.
Michael Anthony Lindo was part of the Windrush Generation of migrants invited to the UK from the Caribbean to support post-war Britain. Arriving from Jamaica aged 11, he settled in Devon, UK, where he later married and started a family. Experiencing alcohol addiction, one day he disappeared. Years later, his family discovered he had travelled to Ireland, where he had died while living in woods near Wexford in Ireland. He was 46.
Dead Dad Book refers to a diary filled with photos, newspaper cuttings, handwritten notes and memories that Lindo and her family kept on their journey to piece together Michael's life and death. Each ceramic in the series recounts a different element of the story – including identity and migration, memories from Lindo's childhood with her dad, her father's disappearance and local press reports from the time of his death.
So each one tells a different story and I didn't actually make them in chronological order … I made the 12 of them and then realised that there was a story once I started putting them together.
There’s always an improvement to be made, isn’t there. And so it is always some kind of snaking evolution. This will have been a reaction to the pot I made previously, and the one previous to that.
In side-by-side studios on an industrial estate in Devon, the earthenware pieces are slip-cast (liquid clay carefully poured into a plaster mould) by Brookes, and then delivered to Lindo next door where she painstakingly applies the rich decoration and narrative using the technique of sgraffito (scratching through the surface layer of colour, revealing the white clay underneath) – widely used to decorate North Devon pottery for centuries – to create her designs.
We both do things and bring things to the work that, individually, we couldn’t.
I always feel like the work needs to have sort of a narrator or a character at the forefront, whether that is the vessel or the cat, or something with a face on the pot. I find those are the ones that sort of speak to me the most.
The pot entitled Birth, Marriage and Death alludes to the three milestones that preoccupied Lindo during the search for information about her father. She realised that she had only known him during the middle stage and the other two, birth and death, were a mystery. Events from her parents' lives are represented in Mother and Father (Love and Kaos). Cats, often in pairs, are a recurring theme in Lindo's work, conveying complimentary imagery and ideas.
Michael Anthony Lindo (Memory Pot) depicts Michael's hobbies and interests, as remembered by the four Lindo sisters, including a kite he had made for Vicky. Lindo was just six when her parents separated and her father disappeared only a few years later. My Dad reveals a touching and poignant childlike perspective on the world through the eyes of a young Lindo. The inscriptions around the jug impart candid insights into family life.
The final four pieces in the series – Swimming in Coolree Reservoir, Yearning for some facts, The Green Man and Wexford People – all convey details of how Michael had lived and died in Wexford, pieced together from newspaper reports and conversations that the family had with local people who knew him.
In this film, we follow the process of remaking the amphora Wexford People – a pot inscribed with text from a local newspaper report on the discovery of Michael Lindo's body as well as a quote from Vicky Lindo's sister Khali, who initiated the journey to find out what had happened to their father.
The original Wexford People pot will go on display in V&A East Museum when it opens in April 2026.
Lindo and Brookes won the British Ceramics Biennial Award for Dead Dad Book in 2019.
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