S5 E1 Mal Wooldford and Charlotte Woolford | No Relation collaborative project

This episode features British filmmaker and photographer Mal Woolford and actor-educator Charlotte Woolford to discuss No Relation — their powerful collaborative project exploring ancestry, identity, and the legacy of transatlantic slavery.

Though not family, their shared surname sparked a profound artistic journey. Using wet-plate collodion photography and archival research, No Relation confronts colonial history and reclaims representation. Their portraits subvert traditional power dynamics, featuring averted gazes, ancestral textures, and Demerara sugar from Guyana — a visceral link to the colonial past.

Themes include historical accountability, the politics of portraiture, and photography’s role in exploring the legacy of colonialisation.

Recorded on 14 August 2025.

Follow the project on Instagram: @relationproject

Podcast details:
Podcast email: artiststalespodcast@gmail.com
Website: www.artiststales.net
Instagram: @artists_tales_podcast
Threads: @artists_tales_podcast

Transcript

Welcome to Artist Tales, a podcast that features and celebrates artists from different walks of life. I'm your host, Heather Martin, and in this first episode of Series five, I'm joined by filmmaker and photographer Mal Woolford, an actor educator, Charlotte Wilford. Two collaborators connected by history, but not by family.

Their project, No Relation, is a powerful exploration of identity, ancestry, and the enduring legacy of transatlantic child slavery. After discovering, they shared the same surname and nothing else seemingly in common. A deeper investigation revealed that Mal's ancestors were settlers and slave holders in Barbados and British Guyana.

While Charlotte may descend from those once enslaved in the Wilfred household. The shared name became the starting point for an artistic partnership shaped by research reckoning and radical empathy using a 19th century photographic technique known as wet plate collodion, incorporating materials like DeMare sugar and focusing on image making as co-creation rather than control.

The work evokes absence presence. The invisible threads that ties to the past. The project took them from archival sites in Guyana, a deeply symbolic exhibition at the Westminster Quaker Meeting House in London. Together we'll dive into how portraiture can challenge power, how art can bridge uncomfortable truths, and how two artists with no relation redefined connection through creative inquiry.

Welcome, Mal and Charlotte. Thank you. That was a lovely introduction. Yeah, it was really lovely. It was very sweet. Thank you. Well, it's lovely to have you before we get into the project that uh, you're working on. So I'll hand over to Charlotte. Would you like to tell us a bit more about yourself? Uh, yeah. I work in a school, consider myself to be an educator and I work in a secondary school with secondary children.

And, but at the same time, I like to consider myself open to arts, open to if someone comes to me with an artistic view, I or a creative view, I, uh, I open myself to that as well. So I think that's probably what I'm about right now. Thank you. She, and how about you, Mal? Tell us a bit more about yourself. I feel completely put on the spot.

So I've been, I, I've been a few things. I've, for a long time I wanted to work with, uh, moving Image and I was screen write. I've done screenwriting. I've been di directed fiction films as well and found my way to still photography really, and that, that kind of really scratches my itch in terms of. Really, I find it very satisfying in terms of the actual creative practice, but also around some of the philosophical underpinnings of what photography is and what it can do.

That sounds really interesting. Both of you come from very different backgrounds. So tell me a little bit more about how you discovered that you share a surname. So, Mal, I'll, I'll turn to you actually, if you wanna tell that story. Well, we knew each other from the school playground, so our, um, not our, we with our, our church, it makes it sound like we were at school together.

Um, Shaw, um, I think, um, our kids were at the same school together, so we, we'd see each other in the playground during school, pick up and drop off. And we were sort of on nodding terms, weren't we? Yeah. And that until one point, at one point we were, I was at the, I went to a walk-in clinic with my neighbor.

My had an el elderly neighbor, so I was accompanying him and Charlotte was there with, uh, one of her children. And that was all, yeah. Still nodding terms until a nurse came out and called the surname Woolford. And I was completely thrown 'cause I wasn't there for myself. Why would somebody be calling my name out?

And Charlotte said, yes, that's, yes, that was her. And she, she went off and saw the nurse with her, her child, and, uh, just let me sat there going, oh, okay. That's, that's quite strange. Yeah. So, yeah, that, that was the initial part of just going, hang on. There's some, there's a connection of some kind here because Walford's a relatively unusual name.

Yeah, and then I, I, uh, saw him there with the older man. I assumed that was his father. And the next day at school, even though we were all on nodding terms, like, oh, hello, I know you, I thought, oh, I better do the, 'cause it's a Catholic school as well. Better do the wonderful thing where I go, oh, how was your father?

So I thought, better ask him how his father did. And uh, so I said, oh, how's your fa How, how was your father? And he said, it wasn't my father, it was my next door neighbor. And I said, oh, okay. So how was he? And he said. He is fine, but it was very strange. And I said, strange in what sense? And he said, well, they, they said your name and I thought it was my name.

And I said, what? And he was like, yeah, because I have the same surname as you. And I was like, oh. I said, okay. And, and I said, oh, that's, that's really interesting. And then I just left it at that. I didn't pursue it. But then he sort of approached me and said that he's really fascinated by our names. And the fact that we know physically we look completely different.

You know, 'cause I'm a black woman and he's a sort of white English man and he would be really interested to sort of figure out where, where our names, where our names met, so to speak, and if they did ever meet, so to speak. And that his love was photography and uh, he'd love to sort of do something photography based.

Uh, creative wise with, with, with, with our names or the, the meaning of I don't, with the meaning of our names, I suppose. I don't know. And how did that make you feel, Charlotte? I mean, it, it sounds, you know, kind of a, I don't know. It's, it's not kind of an obvious avenue to explore kind of how you're, how you share a surname.

Yeah. I mean, I just, at the time I just thought I'm curious, but I'm not that curious. Actually, but I suppose his enthusiasm, let me sort of led me to go actually. Okay. Yeah, sure. I'll, I'll give this a go. It's creative, so I'm quite open to that. So yeah, I'll, I'll give this a go. I was, I was mildly curious, but I wasn't as curious as him.

He was very curious.

So what drove the curiosity, Mal? I mean, both the curiosity and thinking, let's explore this in a photographic project. Well, I'd always been aware of, of people with the Woolford surname for the Caribbean origin. I remember my grandparents seeing somebody who is a school teacher being interviewed, and the, the strap at the bottom of the screen identifying the person, and they were kind of, they talked about it for about a week, about how could that be?

How, how on earth could that be? It's the most English name. So that was a young child. Then that kind stuck with me, and I think, why did it really stick out? I really, I just like to worry away at these, these things or just pick, you know. Pick away and go this, it can't just not mean anything. It's probably quite inconvenient, but I, yeah, but it's interesting and so I really wanna, I want to dig in.

It's, it helps really that Charlotte is so open to, particularly at the beginning, because it was a really kind of clumsy approach. I'm just so willing to, to give it a go. But what happened quite quickly, I got put in touch with somebody who's a genealogist, this guy called Bill Pinfold. He just, he, within a matter of a, a week, he'd identified a lot of source material that that was incredibly helpful in terms of narrowing it down and it narrows down really, really quickly because, again, because the name is an unusual one.

Yeah. And why explore this photographically? So you've done the genealogy and you know, Wilfred is not a common name, so why do photographic kind of exploration of, of that history? I think it's a challenging medium in terms of how do you, how do you photograph that? And so I kind of, that's something I, I really like that challenging aspect of how do you take something.

Photography is really great. You know, you can, you can be very, very straight and direct in terms of, this is a, this is a photographic representation of a thing, but it also has to have the capacity to be metaphorical with it. You can make references and jumps. You can use, uh, you can make references to other artworks you can.

It's incredibly versatile medium, but the great thing that it really has is that it, it exists in time. So your think about photography being a way of freezing something in time, but actually that photograph that you've made is also existing in time as well. And so the whole idea of. This is a connection which has happened historically back in time using photography as a means of talking in terms of time.

So that's how I kind of regard it. And Charlotte, do you have much experience with photography at all before this project? No. No, no. None. None whatsoever. None whatsoever. I don't even like taking photographs on my camera. So that was, that was quite an eyeopener. And now through Mal. I have this wonderful love of, um, analog photography.

You know, I've got myself a little sort of Holger camera as well, and take photographs on the side and, and, you know, it's all analog and it is just, I really, I really like it. It, it fills me in, in a really creative way. I really, I really do like it and I respect. I respect all analog photographers, you know, and I'm just thinking about the, the history between your families.

You know, I've mentioned the transatlantic child slavery, you know, and Ma, your family history has, you know, were slave owners pretty much. So I, it's a question to both of you in terms of how did that sit with you when you started digging and you started researching the kind of family histories you both have and, and the kind of entwined history, which is quite frankly, really challenging.

Yeah. Yeah. It, it felt in, do you wanna go first, Charlotte? I, I think it felt inevitable when we, when we started the journey, it felt like this will be the conclusion. It's just a matter of if, if our families met, where did they meet? But this is kind of almost a foregone conclusion, isn't it? I mean, we're sort of, you know, shutting the door and the horse is already gone.

It's. That's how it felt to me. Like, we are just gonna dig until we do find it. We will. We will find it. You know? And I think we did that. The journey of us going through it was what made myself and Mal's relationship better. Our relationship got closer, and through that closeness we produced. Some of our most, you know, fantastic work in, in, in wet play photography, but it, it's definitely been the journey trying to seek back and see where the, where that journey has sort of started that the, the journey that it's taken us on, that's been the journey of itself and the creative journey and um, no matter how much we feel that sometimes our photography has gotten different or it looks different or it feels different.

It still goes back to that, that question of our, our family and our heritage and where, where we, where our names met, you know, back in Guyana, I suppose, back in, you know, the 18, 18 hundreds in Guyana. In the time, in times of slavery. How about you, Mal? It's sat, sat slightly differently for me. Well, not differently.

I mean, what, what Charlotte was describing, I think for me is also true in that it was great having the physical act of photographing as a way of looking at images and seeing I see something deeper. I see something older. Things that seem sometimes like ancestral because we shoot with very long exposures.

Your faces become kind of archetypal. I, I, I dunno the right, the best word to use it becomes not Charlotte's face or my face, but something, something more essential or older. And so that's, there's a real, that's, you get these little bits of feedback from the way you're photographing and looking and reviewing and going, this is really.

This is showing me something that we wanna, you know, either we wanna repeat or don't wanna repeat. So, but in terms of emotionally, I, it was for a long time, very, I found it very, very heavy going. I was doing lots of reading and lots of, I went to the national archives in q and I went and I was explo going through slave registers.

And that is, you know, that's a really heavy thing to do. Because it's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of investment in his, historically, in our families of being passed down, of omitting this, this knowledge or downplaying it. And while the, the Woolfords weren't, so the Woolfords that. We're in Guyana, essentially cousins, so it's my six times great, grand great uncle who went out and his, his family was founded from Barbados and then to Guyana.

The, but the connection is. And they weren't large plantation owners. And so what it brings home is just how ubiquitous or how common it was for people to have connections to enslavement and how ordinary it was. And and coming full circle to an ordinary situation in London where Charlotte and I standing next together in a.

Next to each other in a playground, not having any awareness for years that we had that this, there's this, there's this connection that, that this connection that we have. Yeah, it's very, very strange and very surreal when you think about it. And it just shows the continuing impact of the slave trade, you know?

A lot of it we don't know because we don't talk about it, you know, and a lot of that history there is that history, but it, there's also erasure and I'd imagine the boats with the slaves in it, I would imagine there are no names. And they take the name of slave owners. So you just completely erase kind of somebody's history.

Yeah. Yeah. That's essentially what happened to, to everyone who was of, of a color, I suppose at that time. It was whatever your name was, wasn't irrelevant, was, you know, your, your named after us now. Thank you. And, uh, that's the way it goes. Yeah. Just to pick up on the language. Um, so currently the, we tend to re refer to people as being enslaved and enslavers, so the, rather than owners as holders.

So we kind of wanna Okay. Get rid of that whole legalistic thing. The idea of ownership being mm-hmm. Normalized if you. It's a very good point because I think that that language is still, you know, people use it, but it's a really good point around enslavers and ens, slaves, you know, it's, it gives a, a different perspective and you don't own people.

Hmm. I'm just interested in kind of why you've chosen what plate photography, because I have seen the images, you know, or a number of your images, and they are very haunting, and I think that type of technology does lend itself to the type of things you're doing. But I'd like to hear from both of you. You know, why were you kind of drawn to that particular type of photography?

Because. It is isn't mainstream. I mean, even analog is becoming, I mean, there's a bit of a subculture of it, you know, but it's not the norm. It's, you know, people have gone digital, whereas we plate photography is even more subculture, if you see what I mean. Yeah. For me personally, myself and Mal met up, it was COVID time, just at the end of COVID.

And, uh, he said he wanted to start the project again with me. Uh, and uh, I said, okay. He said, but I dunno what direction to take it in. I knew he had recently did a wet plate photography course and he showed me the, the sort of the image that he got of himself when he did the course and I said, oh, this is it.

We, we have to go in this direction. He looked amazing in this photograph and I remember saying, we, we should definitely, definitely go for this. And there was something about it when we first started doing it. I mean, gosh, kudos to mouth chemicals and everything it, it does is, is a headache and it costs a lot of money.

But, uh, and, but the results were just amazing. And it seemed, uh, it seemed to marry everything that we were talking about, everything that we were doing before in, in the past. Suddenly this, this creative aspect suddenly just. Just pushed us right into, into where we wanted to be. And I know you say that, that there were some pictures that are very haunting, but it's that thing of like, I don't know, it's like going right back to the beginning, like this was the first medium of sort of photography and it just seemed correct by our creative standards to start right at the beginning and and that's where we still are, right At the beginning we had the kind of idea of.

What, 'cause the point at which, um, the, the compensation was being paid to enslavers in around 1834 was just at the that point where photography is just emerging as a, as a, as a medium. And so it felt right to go back to. We had the kind of had the idea of what if we were working with technology, which was available to those people, but it was in the hands of people who weren't wanted to be in right.

Relationship in equality with each other. How would that be? Because the web plate as it was used, it was in the hands of people who were like Julie, Margaret Cameron, who had plantations in in Sri Lanka, who photographed their servants. So there's always a kind of a power-based or a class-based component within web plate?

Not entirely, because there were practitioners who would go around and take photographs of people for small amounts of money. It did become democratized. But in for large images of the start, the short that we were doing, it was a very exclusive thing to do. Um, so what then became was that we, um, the, the physical aspect of making the plates meant that Charlotte could be completely involved.

Rather than, initially we were working on film and I was processing it and I was very much taking her photograph and she would sit for me and it felt, again, clumsy. Once we got into working with Web Plate, we be, we could completely co photograph together. I mean, do you remember that first time that we, you said.

Give it to me. No. So I, I think I was about to pour like the third or fourth plate that we'd done together. And, and Charlotte, you just said, uh, I'll do that. And, and that's the point at which you went, okay, great. This is, this is what I, this is what I was hoping for. That, that we, we'd find a way of working together.

That was the two of us making images together. And, and we don't keep track of who develops the image. Yeah, who pause the plate. It's very much, um, this image is made by both of us to the point where we, we don't individually own the pictures. You are currently looking after them at the moment, SHA I think most of them, yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Mal had an extension, so I had to take all the frames of boxed up. But, uh, his studio's in effect now, so, but yeah, no, no. We work quite harmonious together. Somewhere, you know, he, he'll set it up and I'll then come in and do some bits and pieces and we, we, we, we share sort of 50 50 of it. So, so it's, it's, we work quite well together.

Yeah. At least I think we do. I'm not sure. I think you're underselling it. I think we work very well together. As, as someone who's had my portrait taken, I think you're amazing. You work amazingly well together. Thank you, Heather. No, we had great fun with you the day you came over. It was really lovely. Oh, I had great fun as well and I'll certainly do it again.

I plan to do it again. One thing I've been reflect, or there's been a couple things I've been reflecting on, you know, there's certainly using the wet plate technology, there's something kind of historic or something timeless about it, but they're also the images you take. Are very contemporary and there's that kind of, you know, and yes, there's, you know, I can see the haunting ness in, in them and particularly the, the subject matter.

But I'm just thinking and just reflecting what I'm seeing in them and is you kind of dealing with subject matter that is two, 300 or if not longer years old, you know, goes back generations, you know? And, and we're still seeing the effects of, even if it's not blatant, but it's that kind of. As you say, using technology of the time, but in a very different way.

So it's, you know, trying to re rebalance the, the power dynamics or making it, making it much more collaborative. But I'm just thinking too, it's that kind of tension between the contemporary and history and what has happened, and I'm just wondering if that was something you were conscious of or is just kind of there.

I think we've become more conscious of it when. When we definitely did the, um, our little sort of capsule collection and we had it up at the, you know, the Quaker Center and how people viewed it, how people who would hear our story would then look at it and go, oh, everything is related. You know, it is, we, I think we thought we were sort of doing something quite modern and something quite contemporary, and everyone just goes, no, this is the past.

You know, so it is just, it is, it's, it is a juxtaposition. It is weird, you know, and even when you think you've traveled far from it, you know, we were inspired, I think one of the last shots of the collection. We were inspired by modern sort of, um, contemporary stuff. We were very overwhelmed from Guyana. We just wanted to take some fun shots, and that happened to be one of the last ones we put in our capsule collection, and everyone was like, oh, this is the one that, this is the one, this is the slavery one.

You know? And you were just going, not, not really. No. But, but, but yeah, so it's, it's really weird. Like, you, you, you do it, but because of the subject matter and how we met, it's very hard for people to pull away from it or, or to see something else. I think, well, I I, I'd approach it slightly differently, and that's the, if you think about that household in guy, you have people in very close proximity to each other, but they still have, they have that status relationship between them, but they were effectively living in one property together, the enslaved and the enslave.

And I think I always, part of the original thought was how could they, how could they do that? How could they maintain that relationship when you are living in quite close, intimate circumstances? And I think one of the things that the wet plate does, particularly the way that we're doing portraiture together, is that you're really looking, really, the camera is close.

The faces are close to full, you know, real, real size and you can really, really, it's, it's kind of careful looking portraiture. And I think that's partly what makes it look so contemporary. 'cause it's very, IM that's immediate, but then again, it's through the lens, you know, it's through a, it's through an old lens and it's through.

An old technique, which kind of, it gives you a kind of shimmering vibrating sense of past and present kind of colliding with each other or in interacting. That's really interesting. So I, I can now see that from that point of view as well, because certainly when I've shown the pictures of me, the portraits of me, people are like that.

That looks very 19th century and it's, although I'm wearing, wearing very contemporary clothes with contemporary hairstyle, it still has that. Yeah, that looks like it could be two centuries ago, you know? So, yeah, no, it's, it's that kind of, I like that play between contemporary and and historic. And I think due due to the subject matter you're dealing with, that can be really quite powerful as well.

Now, one thing I did mention in the introduction is wet plate for photography can incorporate materials like dire sugar, and now sugar for me is very. A plant. So was that another factor or is that something that you'd considered when choosing this type of medium to, to take photographs with?

Certainly for me in terms of trying to bed the process into, into something which would relate it to Guyana, I would say very much before we were, we, before we went there, I was looking for anything, any way to feel connected to the subject and the fact that there's a, there's a developer recipe which involves sugar.

Just decided to, you know, change the sugar type and, and do that because it was a way to connect. Now that we've been there, I think it's. It. Um, I kind of feel that, and we've shown the work there. I, I feel that we've, we've made that connection and so that becomes less important because, um, because we've, uh, this kind of feels ground.

The whole project feels grounded now. Yeah. Mal was very sorry. Mal was very excited about using di era sugar. Um, the, anything that would sort of pull us back to pull us back to Guyana. And also there was, there was also the frames. He was building, he was getting someone to build a couple of frames for us to hold the wet plates.

Uh, 'cause glass is quite heavy. And, uh, we got this, uh, he said, oh, there's this tree called Purple Heart. And the guy said, it's from, you know, the man who was making the frame said it's the, here are the Guyanese woods and Mao chose Purple Heart. And we just assumed that it would be, I just assumed it was a wood that was called Purple Heart.

I had no idea it was literally neon purple in color. It was absolutely gorgeous. And of course, our frames stood out in the, in the, in the gallery amongst all the other sort of plain black, black frames and how so? It was really, really lovely. How about you, Charlotte? Is that something you're interested in or is it secondary to, to what?

Doing with the project.

Um, to me. Yeah. But the thing is, I, I, when someone is so enthusiastic about something, it's, it's, it's so easily, you easily get just pulled in with it. You, you, it's like a cyclone. You get sucked in with it, and you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you, you sort of turn into a puppy, you're like, you're like, yes, that's amazing.

Yes, let's do it. You and, uh, mal is so enthusi enthusiastic about certain things to deal with the photography and to deal with the web plates that you do, you do get pulled in. So, yeah, no, it, it became important to me as well. Which was really nice because it's something that I've almost been separated from because I was born here and I was raised here, and my mom talks of Guyana sometimes, but you know, the siblings that I was raised with, my mom had eight of us and the siblings, she had four of them that were born in Guyana and four of us that were born here.

And I've, of course, I was raised with the four that were born here, my older sister, myself, and my two younger brothers. So we never really had much sort of. Cultural wise to sort of affiliate with Guyana. We knew, I knew my mom was from Guyana and there were certain foods that came from Guyana. You mentioned some, the feedback you've gotten much holding, you both have gotten holding me to it about the project at Westminster Quaker meeting House.

I mean, I know you've had that big, big exhibition there, or that exhibition there. Oh, quite actually. I call it big. It's quite a profound exhibition. To be fair. That's probably a better word for it. What other feedback or what other, I'm curious of about how people engage with that exhibition because it's not an easy subject matter.

No, it's not an easy subject matter. And, um, and it was, I, I don't know if I didn't, I, I dunno if I knew that it wasn't easy when, when, when it was up there. It was very, very bizarre. I sort of like, it sort of, sort of came in like, oh, this is actually quite difficult, almost. Especially when, 'cause as my input is, this is how we met, this is what we've done and this is what we're doing.

But people, people were very, people's reactions to it were very intense and quite heavy. The best session we had was at the end, uh, we had one, we had a closing session with everybody and we invited lots of people and that was really good 'cause they all came at the same time. So it wasn't like I was sort of leading one group around of people, and then Mal was leading another group.

And then I'd go to the next group and sort of walk them, talk them through it. That was really good and it was all organic and all the questions were there and we answered it. But yeah, I mean it was, it was sort of that thing of like, I just, I just like the process. I like taking photos and then people were like, this is really heavy.

It was like, I suppose it's, you know, and looking at, you know, the house that, you know, that was a last known location that, you know, email, the enslaved were at comments. It was like, wow. Did, how did you experience that feedback? It was quite heavy.

I think the one, the mo, the most striking thing for me was how people were able to, it enabled people to talk about something they didn't feel they could normally talk about. Yeah, I agree. So, I mean, yeah, I think that's, and that's the, that's the great thing about something that, that is creative people.

It, it, it takes away positions and people can just respond to the work. I mean, and, and some people just really just read what they wanted to read into it. It's hard to tell, is it, are they projecting into it or is it there? It's there to be seen. I think for, for us it was a real test to see if the work stood up and we printed the, we printed the images quite large and.

It was, it really did. So, and it was hard to tell initially whether that would happen, but again, it, it was Charlotte saying, now we need to have an exhibition. And uh, I think that's been one of the great benefits of us partnering together. Has been Charlotte going, I feel it's time you need to do this. And she's always right.

But you remember right at the end I said, no, it's not the right time. And you were like, well, we're already here. And I was like, yeah, you can't get cold feet off you time to do it. It's happening. So final question is what's next? I know Greenbelt is in a couple weeks. We're in August 2025 and I know the exhibition you're gonna show it there.

You're also gonna show it later in the year in Southampton. So it sounds like you have some plans and you've gotten some coverage in some of the Quaker publications and, and Imagine elsewhere as well, and this podcast. So what are your plans, you know, in terms of what's next? I mean, there's a few things in, in the bag, but, uh, what else would you like to do with it?

I think absolutely it's the next phase is, is a book. And I think I'd like to, Charlotte and I, we haven't discussed this yet. I'm, I'm thinking, I'm thinking about showing it in smaller spaces actually. I wanna find a way of getting the actual plates shown in a really, really beautiful way. So that's for me, and, and the book is a, a, a book.

It would be great just because it allows a kind of intimate way of looking at, at, looking at the work in the quiet way. So I'm excited about both of those. Yeah, definitely a book. Uh, we've spoken about a book many, many times and we've really need to sort of, um, get on that and, uh, have a book and. Do a book launch and all those wonderful things that happen with a book launch.

So yeah, gonna go out there and say that. Yeah, definitely. Brilliant. We're gonna have to do it then. Yeah, I have to definitely. And I'm gonna be one of the first. Thank you so much. Well, great. It's been lovely speaking with you. It's been so fascinating to talk about your project and, and where you see it taking you.

So I'd like to thank you both for being guests on this podcast. Thank you, Heather. We love the show and looking forward to hearing the next season. Yes, and all the exciting people you got. Thank you so much, Heather. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for tuning into my conversation with Mal in Charlotte.

I hope he found their project, No relation, as moving and thought provoking as I did. The work reminds us how art can uncover hidden histories, challenge inherited narratives, and spark meaningful dialogue. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out Mal’s and Charlotte's social media handles in the show notes.

And if this episode resonated with you, please share it with friends. Leave a review or help spread the word. In the next episode, I'll be speaking with Jacqueline Suowari whose astonishing drawings crafted with ballpoint pen and mixed media explore emotion, identity, and the beauty of detail. You won't want to miss it.