At the end of the Treasure Beach road, just a stone’s throw from the seas of Frenchman’s Bay, sits Mazola Wa Mwashighadi’s outdoor studio, Found Objects. It’s a quiet stretch of Jamaica’s South coast, where life moves in sync with the sea’s ebb and flow. Mazola’s studio stands at the far end of the road that stretches from the bay. From afar, the studio reads like a closed down corner shop. But upon closer approach, I’m greeted by a wooden and zinc-clad foyer. His cat, One Love, meets me at the door, and soon after, Mazola arrives, ushering me into his reticent, tucked-away space. Stepping inside Found Objects feels like stepping into a carefully assembled world, one built with intention, resourcefulness, and an acute awareness of place.
For Mazola, born in Kenya’s Taitā-Taveta District and now rooted in Treasure Beach, the act of place-making is deeply personal. He graduated in 1987 completing his teacher training in Nairobi, before he came to Jamaica in 1997 to the Edna Manley College on a Commonwealth Fellowship Award in art and craft—and he never left. Having navigated the nuances of migration and belonging within the Black diaspora firsthand, he understands not just the physical labor of constructing a space, but the emotional weight of forging a home in unfamiliar landscapes.
Much of the studio itself is a testament to this understanding of placemaking and belonging. Mazola built the Found Objects space largely by hand, viewing it as an artwork in its own right, and sourcing materials from the local community to create a structure existing in quiet harmony with its surroundings. His approach is one of deep sensitivity working with, rather than imposing upon, the land. In a place where so many visitors arrive with an extractive gaze, he has instead embedded himself firmly into the terrain, constructing not just a studio, but a home that reflects the rhythm and resilience of the landscape and his experience within it.
The process is almost alchemical, salvaging fragments from the shores and streets of Treasure Beach and transforming them into striking installations that carry untold stories, as part of a larger narrative of stewardship and creativity in the Caribbean landscape. “I make compartments. It’s like a documentation of many things that happened,” he says. His practice doesn’t just engage with history and identity, it also reckons with the environment. For Mazola, his work serves as both witness and response to the Caribbean’s fragile biodiversity, which faces mounting threats from natural disasters and human activity. This reconstructive approach is an act of repair—both literal and metaphorical—where found objects are not just repurposed but reimagined. The assemblages feel both archival and speculative, prompting conversations about belonging, inclusion, and the transient nature of material history under threat of climate crisis.
Paradise (2022) is a prominent example of this within the studio, acting as a meditation on freedom, both physical and mental. “After the hurricane (Beryl), I walked along the beach and found this long, heavy wooden piece that had washed up,” he explains. The materials did not simply appear to him; they revealed themselves. The work draws from historical narratives of resistance, specifically the enslaved Africans who chose to jump overboard rather than endure the horrors of captivity. He had previously represented people using beads, but for this piece, he sought something different: objects cast away by the sea. The artist presents this act not as a tragedy, but as a radical assertion of agency and challenges the dominant narratives of victimhood. The piece refuses to dwell solely on trauma, instead emphasizing resilience, choice, and the ability to reclaim one’s own narrative.
He intentionally brings the environment to the foreground to act as a sort of co-creator with his work. The work engages with a broader Caribbean art historical discourse on waste, dispossession, and postcolonial materiality.
The Treasure Beach studio is shaped by the intersections of tourism, migration, and sustainability. His work complicates traditional understandings of materiality, interrogating how discarded objects hold memory and identity. Aesthetically in conversation with the neo-Taíno movement in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, his assemblages recover and reframe Caribbean histories through contemporary remnants, making the past a living presence. To collect and repurpose found materials in this context is to engage directly with the realities of the climate crisis, where the detritus of hurricanes and rising tides becomes both artifact and warning. Hurricanes like Beryl, which intensified at an unprecedented rate this season, are stark reminders of this growing instability.
Informing this environmental volatility is his acute awareness of the ways colonialism and foreign influences have shaped the social landscape, commenting on the erasure of local identities. This is seen in another of his studio works on display, the defiantly titled I’m Not Combing My Hair (2024). His perspective resonates with a broader anti-colonial kinship amongst the Black diaspora, particularly with places like Jamaica (which gained independence just a year before Mazola’s natal Kenya) highlighting parallel struggles of cultural reclamation and resilience.
Nuances in African and Caribbean experiences permeate his practice, yet Mazola describes himself simply as a vessel, stating, “Art is a vehicle where I do many things, propagate my own philosophy, but also I am just a vessel.” In I’m Not Combing My Hair (2025), seven iron keys serve as a metaphor for identity. The installation references restrictions on Black hairstyles in certain spaces (often coinciding with colonial tourism conditioning), offering a subtle but profound commentary on the racial politics around these hairstyles even in postcolonial, Black majority spaces. Seven iron keys hang from fibre cables at the bottom of the artwork, symbolizing the spiritual nature of the Black hair experience. “Knowing yourself is really key,” clarifies Mazola. “Your identity is really key, and here on my piece, you have seven keys. Seven, remember, is a complete number… it’s completion. I think that’s biblical.”
The piece challenges imposed norms and expectations and offers a quiet but firm resistance to the colonial legacies that still dictate self-presentation. “It’s not even about Rasta, no. It’s about identity. I don’t want to fit in,” he asserts. His perspective disrupts the notion that self-acceptance must be negotiated through external validation. He expands on this: “You see, people will call it rebellion, but it’s really freedom. If God made me this way, why should I change?” For Mazola the work reframes natural hair as both a personal and political statement, a symbol of autonomy and self-definition.
The installation echoes this sentiment—his choice to let his hair be, like the keys in the piece, reflects the strength to be found in embracing one’s origins, unburdened by imposed expectations. Through I’m Not Combing My Hair (2025), Mazola invites viewers to reconsider the relationship between identity and resistance, between spirituality and self-determination. His work stands as both an artistic and philosophical statement—resisting colonial legacies while embracing the power of self-knowledge.
Mazola’s work engages deeply with Caribbean identity, spirituality, and environmental reckoning, turning found materials into layered narratives of loss and renewal. While rooted in the local, its potential for resonance is undeniably global within the diaspora—uniquely challenging how those of us here see, reclaim, and reimagine the discarded within the Jamaican landscape.
