Laws of Folk
On folklore, ritual and the unwritten laws of Afro-diasporic life
Every culture carries a body of law that was never written down. Not legislation, inheritance. The knowledge of how to move through the world. What the mask means. What the drum says. What the figure in the street during Carnival is actually doing. What survives when official history refuses to record you.
Laws of Folk is a major body of work exploring those laws. Through large scale figurative drawing, dense mark making, collage and embedded symbolism, the project asks how Afro-diasporic folklore survives, not in archives, but in bodies. In performance. In music. In masquerade. In the faces people wear when they move through worlds that were not built for them.
The central figures are drawn from Trinidadian Carnival tradition, the Jab Jab, the Jab Molassie, the stick fighter, the drummer. The work is not illustration. It does not explain folklore. It inhabits it. Each piece holds realism against distortion, presence against pressure, visibility against concealment.
Laws of Folk will bring together large scale works on paper, smaller studies and selected new pieces exploring Caribbean folklore, masks, sound, ancestral presence and the unwritten cultural laws carried through Afro-diasporic life. The Works include Pay the Devil, Mary in the Light and Jay, with additional works to be unveiled at the exhibition.
The Unwritten Record
The Windrush generation arrived in Britain carrying a complete cultural world, music, masquerade, ritual, belief, folklore, embodied knowledge passed through generations of Caribbean life. Very little of it was formally documented. The institutions that might have preserved it were not built for it. Much of what survived did so through people, through community, through the continuation of practice.
Laws of Folk is positioned at the edge of that continuity. It documents what is still living, the folklore that continues in steel pan orchestras, in Notting Hill Carnival, in the Jab Jab who still takes to the street, while acknowledging what is at risk of being lost as that generation passes.
Trinidad, Field Research
Myers' research has included time in Trinidad, engaging with Carnival, masquerade, Jab Jab and Jab Molassie traditions, stick fighting, steel pan, sound, movement and cultural inheritance. A further Trinidad and Tobago research phase, supported by the Westway Trust International Artist Bursary, is planned for the end of 2026 and will extend the project beyond the London exhibition. The work that followed is rooted in that Research.
Trinidad is where the laws originated. London is where they were carried. Laws of Folk moves between both, anchored in the Trinidadian cultural source while examining what that inheritance looks like in a West London community that has held it for seventy years.
Cultural memory does not disappear immediately. It thins.
October 2026 is Black History Month. It is also the year the Windrush generation's story is being contested, commemorated and in some cases still corrected. Laws of Folk is not a commemorative exhibition. It is an active one, insisting that this cultural knowledge is not past tense, not heritage, not nostalgia. It is living law. It still governs. It still moves through people. The work exists to make that visible.
Opening Night
Private view and opening reception. By invitation. For collectors, curators, institutional partners, community leaders and those whose cultural inheritance the work speaks to.
Talks & Workshops
Talks, conversations and workshop activity are being considered as part of the exhibition's public development. Details will be confirmed closer to the opening.
Laws of Folk is conceived as a body of work that extends beyond a single exhibition. Following London, the project is positioned for further development, a return to Trinidad, expanded research, and international presentation.
Institutions and partners interested in the future development and Recognition of Laws of Folk are welcome to make contact.