4 Years In Dreamland - Geoffrey Chambers, Jas Dhillon & Peter Nicholls
Saturday 14 June - Sunday 3 August 2025
4 Years In Dreamland - Geoffrey Chambers, Jas Dhillon & Peter Nicholls
Friday 10th October - Tuesday 21st October
Between 2020 and 2024, as we waited for a promised building that never materialised, People Dem Collective was given an abandoned office in Dreamland. Harsh strip lighting above, tired blue carpet underfoot. What could have been a stopgap became our HQ, a place we transformed into a community space with studios and, in the process, planted the seed of our residency programme.
In that time, artists Geoffrey Chambers, Jas Dhillon, and Peter Nicholls worked alongside us. Their journeys have included commissions from PDC, self-initiated projects, and opportunities supported by other organisations. Not all the works in this exhibition were commissioned by us, but all were nurtured, in part, by the confidence, community, and sense of belonging that a Black and Brown-led space in Dreamland made possible.
The exhibition brings together photography, ceramics, mark-making, sound, installations, social practice, and research-driven work rooted in archives and histories. It shows how practice can take root and flourish when artists have access to space, care, and time, even in unlikely conditions.
4 Years in Dreamland is both a reflection of what was made in those years, and a wider reminder: nurturing artists requires more than short-term projects. It needs environments of trust, continuity, and care. For us, this connects directly to spatial justice, the fight for permanent premises where Black and Brown-led art and culture can thrive, rather than survive.
Geoffrey Chambers
Geoffrey Chambers born in London with Caribbean heritage, I am an expanded arts practitioner based in Margate, working across Caribbean, Atlantic, and British cultures. My practice spans mark-making, performance, film, and installation, with a focus on Afro-surreal cultural texts that explore belonging, migration, identity, and race through reparative forms.
Partially hearing, I earned an MA in Race, Media, and Social Justice from Goldsmiths, University of London (2019), where I focused on Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism. During COVID, I founded the Soulark Ensemble, an improvisational sound project, and continue as artist-in-residence with the PeopleDem Collective in Margate. I also lead a weekly joy-centered mark-making class and, in 2023, received Arts Council DYCP funding to support my practice.
Peter Nicholls
Peter Nicholls is a historian and artist from Margate, whose work centres on Indian Ocean Creole heritage and diasporic, oceanic, and creolised histories. Peter draws on ways of knowing emerging from Creole traditions of subverting, breaking up, and re-building what is prescribed, fusing the result with diverse and amalgamated fragments of what can be remembered or imagined of the ancestral, ancient, sacred, and supernatural.
Through a practice combining archival research, archaeology, explorations of oral and cultural memory, traditional music, diasporic hydro-poetics, spirituality, and lived experience between oceanic realms, Peter delivers stories through archival collage, drawing, sound art, creative writing, and the curation of historic material. Peter’s practice seeks both to push the bounds of known history, and open channels for reaching into the past with reparative and devotional energy.
Jas Dhillon
Jas Dhillon is a multidisciplinary artist, who uses her Punjabi-Sikh, Indian heritage, and a deep reverence for nature and spirituality, to create spaces for a tender and sensitive reflection on ideas of identity, rootedness and belonging.
Through her work, she is interested in unveiling the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the idea that art is not separate from life. But that life, nature, and spirituality, are all art. And as such we are all artists.
Working with objects, memories, the senses, stories, and feelings, she aspires to create spaces for thoughtful reflection and connection.
