Sonia Boyce started her career in the 1980s within the Black Arts Movement with figurative drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in the United Kingdom. She also explored more complex objects in her collages. “I started making works with hair that I bought from shops, Afro-Caribbean hair shops and I started making these very strange objects,” she says. Her work often contains caricatures, which are meant to exaggerate some personality traits of her subjects. They are often grotesque and can incite negative perceptions of their subjects. By using caricatures, Boyce allows herself to reclaim them in her own image.

In more recent years, Sonia Boyce started using a variety of mediums in her work by inviting a broad range of participants to come together and speak, sing or move in relation to the past and the present. “I usually invite people that I find what they're doing is interesting. I don't tell people what they are going to do. […] I brought them together, they had never met before knowing that they both kind of work with improvisation. I'm trying desperately not to tell people what to think versus what I think the early works were because that was all these things that I had to say,” she explained.