Sugar Coated (2025) by Corrina Eastwood

The work explores this through responding to and evoking memories regarding one of her father’s trades, as a car tyre dealer and fitter. This work is quite commonplace in Romani communities and required him to regularly visit London, from his home in Berkshire, to sell and trade in stock.

The installation also takes inspiration from the former use of the London Museum Docklands building which was a sugar storage warehouse. Knowledge of this former use of the building triggered vivid memories for the artist surrounding her father’s work as a tyre trader.

She has incorporated 3D printed casts of her father’s hands, that were taken in the weeks before he passed away. The sugar bowls are Royal Crown Derby Imari, which are popular and widely collected within Romani communities.

“During my early childhood my dad would often not only use the entire side of our house to store hundreds of tyres he would be trading in, but he would also use our small kitchen to cut tyre tread. This would result in the entire house smelling of burnt rubber and thousands of zigzagged lengths of trye tread being discarded on the kitchen floor.

At the end of his working day his hands would be covered in tyre black. He would often ask me as a child to stand on a stool to reach his hands in the sink and, following squeezing copious amounts of washing up liquid into his palms, he would then ask me to pour sugar in small piles into each hand so he could then rub his hands together and use the gritty substance to properly remove the tyre black.

This used to feel like an important and intimate ritual to me where I felt close to my Dad and helpful, as an active part of the way our family earned money, something that was always an openly discussed ongoing effort, surrounded by a sense of uncertainty and anxiety, yet also celebration and joy if things felt financially stable for a while.

As a child these collective concerns felt difficult to know, yet equally they felt to centre and unite my family, where dynamics often felt fractured and troubled. I now know just how significant racialised trauma and trans and intergenerationally transmitted traumas, racism and exclusion were, in this shared holding of uncertainty surrounding economic stability.”