Born in London of Caribbean heritage, Geoffrey Chambers is an expanded arts practitioner based in Margate. His work is shaped by the cultural histories of the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and Britain, and centres on painting and image-making as the core of his practice. Working across painting, mark-making, performance, film, and installation, he draws on Afro-surreal cultural texts to explore ideas of belonging, migration, identity, and race through reparative and imaginative forms.
Chambers was the winner of the inaugural Brixton Open in 2002. In 2005 he moved to Brazil and later became a founder of the reggae collective Dread in Brasil in Salvador, Bahia, where he was honoured to perform in the Salvador Carnival with his own Trio Elétrico — a first for a British-born artist.
His short film Prove It was presented at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Bilingual, he studied painting at MAM in Salvador, Brazil in 2013 and drawing at the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii in 2014. He returned to the UK in 2015 and has exhibited regularly since. He was also a writer and director’s consultant on the 2016 four-part BBC documentary Black Is the New Black.
In 2019 he completed a master’s degree in Race, Media and Social Justice at Goldsmiths, University of London, where his research focused on Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism as cultural texts.
Born out of Covid, a key strand of his practice is the Soulark Ensemble, a multidisciplinary project bringing together music, performance, moving image, and visual art. The ensemble reflects his ongoing interest in collective memory, migration, and sound as a form of cultural storytelling, and continues his commitment to collaborative, experimental work that moves between live performance and image-based practice.
He continues his practice as a trustee and artist-in-residence at Peopledemcollective in Margate, and teaches joy-centred mark-making through regular classes. In 2023 he was awarded Arts Council England DYCP funding.
His work is a dialogue on reclaiming overlooked histories while creating emotionally direct images that balance documentary reference with imagination, tenderness, and quiet resistance.
For CV please click here
