She works at the intersection of biography and history, focusing on post-plantation economies by engaging with a particular landscape on Barbados.
Annalee Davis: Wild T’ings
Florilegium: A gathering of flowers
I am excited to announce that a new series of my drawings titled As if the Entanglement of our Lives did not Matter, is part of the exhibition ‘Florilegium: A gathering of flowers’ which brings together new and existing works from 4 contemporary artists and more than 40 established botanical artists. a
(Bush) Tea Plot – A Decolonial Patch for Mill Workers
My new sculptural work, (Bush) Tea Plot – A Decolonial Patch for Mill Workers, expands on my 2019 permanent installation at the EBCCI, UWI, Cave Hill, (Bush) Tea Plot - A Decolonial Patch. The installations link to shared industrial and colonial histories on both sides of the Atlantic; exploring environmental resilience, regeneration, and healing through the use of wild plants before medicine was widely available.
re: wilding
Solo Exhibition — Inside the Haarlem Artspace Gallery will be exhibited the Wild Plant Series, F is for Frances and Sweeping the Fields. A specially commissioned sculpture responding to the 18th century origin of the gallery’s building as an industrial cotton mill will be installed outside. This work is called (Bush) Tea Plot - A Decolonial Patch for Mill Workers.
RA: Representing Artists Newsletter
The quarterly Barbadian and Caribbean arts newsletter RA (Representing Artists) was produced in the early nineties, spearheaded by a group of Barbados-based artists who saw the need to create a forum for more critical writing around contemporary arts in the region.
Leh We Talk
LWT - Leh We talk is a conversational platform facilitating discussions about race and class with people of different backgrounds and in the unique context on the island of Barbados.
In This New World
A conversation between Marsha Pearce and Annalee Davis.
On race and whiteness from the context of Barbados #1
In this global #BlackLivesMatter moment, we are seeing a shift in conversations about race and it feels like a tipping point. White people in Barbados and the wider Caribbean don’t normally speak about whiteness in our context. Is it a generational shift in that younger people are less willing to live socially segregated or oppressed lives? I’m not sure, but it feels like the time to speak about whiteness and call out the more covert ways in which racism and white supremacy have affected our lives in this Small Island Developing State. And as some others have written about their own monologues, this could be more articulate, but I'll throw my hat in the ring.
The healing effects of bush tea: A conversation with Barbadian visual artist Annalee Davis
Bush tea — infusions of indigenous plants and herbs deemed to have medicinal properties — is still fairly well-consumed in the Caribbean. Barbadian visual artist and cultural activist Annalee Davis is taking the concept to a new level through her work around the well-known drink.
Beach as Plot?
The hotel is to be built in historic Bridgetown, near its Garrison area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Included in the list of buildings are two adjoining warehouses to be demolished to make room for this hotel. The person on the panel representing heritage at the Town Hall Meeting, Andrea Richards, said they would do an archaeological dig once the building is demolished. Surely the goal of listing historic buildings in world heritage sites is not to demolish and then do digs? One of the international architects of the Uruguay based DRS360 Hospitality Lab suggested we locals could “run freely along the beach.”
Heartseed Exhibition
Heartseed is a suite of drawings on 20th Century ledger pages that examines post/plantation dynamics. Offering counterpoints to fixed constructs of the plantation as a closed site of trauma and exclusivity allows for the critical reconsideration of an intertwined space, attuning land with plantation history.
On Being Committed to a Small Place
On Being Committed to a Small Space is the fifth book in the Local Scriptures series - Critical positions from Central America, the Caribbean and its diasporas - an editorial project of TEOR / ÉTica focused on thinking about how the ways of seeing and doing art in the region have been transformed during the last four decades. This new book continues with our objective of making accessible a selection of several of the most relevant speeches and critical positions that have shaped the critical paradigms in Central America and the Caribbean.
Second Spring
While on a Reed Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in the Fall of 2019, I produced a group of six drawings collectively titled Second Spring, to elucidate the shifting interior terrains in the post-reproductive female body.
Parasite Series
This suite of drawings of parasites is inspired both by Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island (1992) and Evelyn O’Callaghan’s introductory text to the fictional 19th century text, With Silent Tread (2002). Benitez-Rojo writes of the “parasitical presence of the island’s sugar-producing history” and “its laborious intestinal history” while O’Callaghan articulates ways in which “white creoles were viewed with suspicion” due to “the fear of miscegenation... addressed indirectly by the use of the trope, disease.”
Post Reproductive Breasts Sprouting Queen Anne’s Lace
This suite of eight pairs of post-reproductive breasts builds on the Second Spring series of drawings which elucidate the shifting interior terrains in the post-reproductive female body. As I continue exploring ageing from the perspective of a woman, these images reference sagging breasts in the older female body, a time in our lives when we can choose to see ourselves more clearly.
(bush) Tea Plots - A Decolonial Patch
As this COVID-19 moment forces us to rethink sustainable futures in the context of small nations, how might we reconsider the potential of wild botanicals, often disregarded as roadside weeds to be sprayed with pesticides? The local slow food movement in Barbados, for example, is noticing a trend in some of our chefs who envision inventive ways to include some of these wild plants into their menus; organic farmers sell Amaranth, pussley and fat pork at Cheapside market. Is this an example of a post-plantation economy whereby historically fatigued landscapes might become sites of genesis and regeneration? Uncultivated botanical growth may offer counterpoints to plantations as fixed sites of trauma, violence, and exclusivity, allowing reconciliation with the land and the virtual slaughterhouse that lies below it.
Archaeology below the Cliff
A detail from the 2014 work, Saccharum officinarum; Queen Anne's Lace is on the cover of this first book-length archaeological study of a non elite white population on a Caribbean plantation. Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society, is written by Matthew C. Reilly, assistant professor of anthropology at the City College of New York and a collaborator with Annalee Davis on the Unearthing Voices interdisciplinary project.
As if the Entanglement of our Lives Did Not Matter
We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. (pp. 27)
The evolution of our “selves” is already polluted by histories of encounter. (pp.29)
—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World - On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin, 2015)
In Defense of Beauty
In Defense of Beauty is a suite of six drawings on 1970s and 1980s plantation ledger pages. Created with latex paint, pencil and, in some cases, gold leaf, depictions of distorted shadows cast by pieces of crochet meander across the neatly delineated rows and columns of the plantation pay list. Suggesting alternative landscapes or floating archipelagos, pieces of eighteenth and nineteenth century porcelain and clay sherds unearthed from former plantation fields infer a fragmented history replete with inconsistencies and fissures.
Reading the Plantation Landscape of Barbados: Kamau Brathwaite’s The Namsetoura Papers and Annalee Davis’s This Ground Beneath My Feet: A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands
and I bent down
listening to the land
and all I heard was tongueless whispering
as if some buried slave wanted to speak again
—Martin Carter