In 1985, when painter Kimathi Donkor moved to Brixton, Dorothy Groce was shot in a police raid on her home just a few doors down. A week later Cynthia Jarret collapsed and died while four officers were searching her home on Broadwater Farm.

"For me, living in one part of the capital where this conflict was happening and having friends living just a street along from the Broadwater estate - it had a very strong resonance with me," explains the artist. "It had a big impact on me as a young black guy living in London - becoming suddenly aware of the way in which policing had become a serious issue of contention and trauma. It was conflict followed by protest followed by conflict."

He put his feelings on canvas, creating work he says was "strong but less considered". Kimathi has since revisited the subject, to create this stunning piece, Madonna Metroplitan , that is on display at the Iniva's Rivington Place Gallery.

"This time I had access," the 47-year-old explains, "I could get records of the newspaper coverage of the coroners court, and a broader range of documented references. There was a more in depth approach, I knew I could make a more powerful artwork.

"The people who were there know what they saw and what happened and the rest of us, we can only imagine. That's where an artist can play a part."

For other paintings in Kimathi's Queens Of The Undead series, there was even less material from which to work from. Wanting to celebrate heroic black women from history, Kimathi was drawn to a number of figures. Some were well documented like Harriet Tubman the 'underground-railroad' leader who freed 70 people from U.S. slavery in the 1850s - others were remembered mainly in myth and legend.

"Tubman is quite a well known figure, she's on the national curriculum in America, she had biographies written about her during her lifetime, there's photographs of her. But while she is well known, her activities had to be very secretive. There's a moment where the documentation stops and you have to rely on people's accounts."

"When you come to someone like Queen Nanny then it becomes even more difficult. There are ony four references to Nanny in historical documents. But at the same time, there's lots of oral history passed down, there's a place in Jamaica named after her - she definitely existed and she was the person it's said she was.

"Aside from that though it's quite hard to unpick what is legend what is fact what is myth. As the artist you have a lot more leeway in that respect to imagine what her presence might have been, I'm trying to conjure up that presence."

Each painting takes references from the art style of the period in which the women lived. One portrait of Queen Nanny, a Jamaican freedom fighter, is painted in the style of Joshua Reynold's portrait of Jane Fleming, Countess of Harrington.

"Fleming's family were wealthy plantation owners in Jamaica," explains Kimathi. "So the wealth that was enabling Reynolds to create his painting was actually coming from that. There's a neat irony in recasting that figure as Queen Nanny of the Maroons who was trying to undermine the plantation system."

Other female figures in the series include Queen Njinga Mbandi who led her armies against the Portuguese empire in Angola and 20th Century anti-colonial commander-in-chief, Yaa Asantewaa. The dramatic large-scale paintings present these often overlooked women as life-size and strong, expressing pathos, wrath, devotion and irony.

"I'm trying to reclaim the lost or under-represented," says Kimathi, "histories which slid under the radar a little bit, histories that are maybe not so prominent in the public consciousness."

After weeks of reseach and study and capturing them on canvas, does he feel he knows more about these 'Queens of the Undead '?

"I think human being are such impossibly complex things, beings, creatures," he says. "The more you know them the more you don't know them, the more you know about them the less you really understand them. The mystery of who a person really is deepens the more you learn."

Queens of the Undead by Kimathi Donkor is at Iniva, Rivington Place, Shoreditch until November 24. Details: 020 7729 9616, www.iniva.org