Linda Brogan: MY MUM IS WHITE – Exorcising Half-Caste* Ghosts

For four weeks, HOME’s main gallery will be transformed into a semi-public artist studio and psychotherapy space, where artist Linda Brogan and psychologist Adam Danquah will lead a process of psycho-social exploration with eight mixed-heritage cultural practitioners based in Manchester. This intergenerational group will work together to excavate personal histories, confront inherited narratives, and build new pathways toward healing and solidarity.

Drawing on each participant’s lived experience, Brogan will create sixteen large-scale drawings directly onto the gallery walls using a unique mind-mapping technique she originally developed as a therapeutic tool in the early 2000s. The result will be an immersive, unruly forest of interconnected stories—a powerful visual and emotional landscape that becomes the setting for a culminating grief ritual devised by the group.

MY MUM IS WHITE – Exorcising Half-Caste Ghosts* is a collective experiment that merges visual art, psychotherapy, and community practice. It serves as both a reckoning and a public invitation to engage with the layered realities of mixed-race identity and intergenerational trauma.

When not in use for private sessions, the studio will remain open to the public, offering a space for quiet reflection and observation. Visitors are invited to witness Brogan at work, explore the evolving installation, and participate in their own conversations around race, heritage, and belonging. A parallel programme of public workshops, led by Brogan and Danquah, will be announced soon.

The term ‘half-caste’ is used with full recognition of its origins in colonialism and slavery, as well as its reappropriation by generations growing up in post-war Britain. In this context, Brogan and Danquah use the term to speak to their own shared experience.

MY MUM IS WHITE is a project by Linda Brogan and Adam Danquah, with curatorial input by Hannah Vollam and produced by Clarissa Corge (Creative Producer: Visual Art, HOME). Generously supported by Arts Council England.