Annalee Davis’ (bush) Tea Services: Botanical Inheritances
by Janice Cheddie
Published in ARC magazine
2016
Janice Cheddie shares a review of ‘(bush) Tea Services’, an installation and performance piece by Barbadian artist Annalee Davis. The project, which explores the multi-layered and complex history of the plantation in the Caribbean, took place in July/August 2016 as part of the temporary Empire Remains Shop in London, curated by artists and curators Cooking Sections. Read her article exclusively on ARC below:
In July/August 2016, Barbadian artist Annalee Davis presented her performance and installation (bush) Tea Services in London, UK as part of the temporary Empire Remains Shop programme, curated by artists and curators Cooking Sections. The Empire Remains Shop functioned as a pertinent reminder of the rituals, erasures and denials of British history that have taken place since the end of the British Empire in the 1950s. Although never realised, the concept of the Empire Shop was developed in the 1920s as a vehicle to promote to the British public the range of consumable goods that were produced in the British Empire. This initiative aimed to remove the British public from the complex interactions of Empire, networks of trade, commerce and movement of people, by reducing the Empire to exotic ingredients that could be used to enhance or spice–up the British culinary diet. Central to the Empire Shop was the idea of the Empire as farm – a managed and productive landscape, selling to the British consumer the products of the Empire as part of Britain’s ‘enriching agricultural project’.
Davis’ installation explores these complex networks of cultivation, production and construction through recovered elements from the Barbados landscape. Davis’ (bush) Tea Services brings into the space of commodity production the oft-forgotten transports of Empire – vegetation, flora and fauna. The author Jill Casid in Sowing for Empire: Landscape and Colonization[i] traces the imperial replanting of the Empire as a managed, improving project. In the Caribbean, the replanting was designed to mask the plantation violence and ecological destruction of the sugar plantation single crop cultivation[ii] by introducing trees, flora and fauna, from across the globe, to reproduce an imaginary tropical landscape. The importation of people, animals, plants, flora and fauna led to the historical development of the word ‘creole’ as a term which referred to people, plants and animals that were born or produced in the Caribbean – through the complex and often forced processes of re-climatisation, importation and transplantation. Bush teas and herbal remedies are still widely used in the Caribbean for common ailments, ritual bathing, and spiritual purification and initiation rites in Caribbean religious practices. The origins of bush teas are found in the fusion of African and Amerindian knowledge-based systems[iii], and orally transmitted through intangible heritage practices. Enshrined in the identification and preparation of the bush tea is an acknowledgement of the importance of the botanical knowledge of the enslaved, the indigenous and the indentured – who often provided the knowledge of the medicinal properties of the plants and their preparation.
Blue Vervain.
In (Bush) Tea Services, Davis serves the bush tea in the formal setting of a colonial drawing room. Visitors to the installation encounter Davis attired in a Queen Anne’s Lace dress while serving (Bush) tea made with Blue Vervain, Fever Grass, Cerasee Bush and West India Bay Leaf. With the exception of the clay used to fabricate the tea service pottery and the West Indian Bay leaf – all elements of the tea service were introduced into the Barbadian landscape through the processes of colonial trade and land production, like many of the commodities celebrated in the Empire Shop. By replacing the imported Indian tea, a coveted colonial commodity, with the pungent bush tea, Davis has introduced, through a sensory response, a visceral reminder of the undercurrents of subjection present within the imperial visual mask, ritualised within the ‘civilising acts’ of the colonial tea ceremony. Davis’ (bush) Tea Services is not a re-enactment of past colonial gestures and performances that can be re-presented to the contemporary audience as a reminder of a benign colonial past; her intervention is an invitational gesture that seeks to enter with the viewer into a dialogue on the deep entanglements of land, land production and the politics of the soil – as a source of subjection, inequality and disruption. Our attention is also directed to the ways that the intangible heritage practices of ‘bush teas’ have often transgressed the boundaries of race, religion, skin colour and class.
Tracing her family back to the seventeenth century, as a white creole woman, Davis’ intervention addresses her own complex relationship to the land and its uses, bringing to the fore how the landscape evokes corporeal and emotional responses of belonging and un-belonging. The source materials for Davis’ work are drawn from remnants and debris recovered on the former plantation that is her home, the Walker’s Estate, and other sites on the island. In sourcing this material, Davis directly seeks to disrupt the idea of the Caribbean as a lush fecund landscape by highlighting imaginary, cultural and ecological practices. The plants for the bush tea have been collected from the ‘Rab Lands’, a land that cannot sustain economic agricultural production. However, this depletion of the Caribbean soil is a documented by-product of the sugar monoculture. The clay for the tea service was collected from the Scotland District on the East Coast of Barbados and from former sugarcane fields, Davis also collected ceramic and porcelain shards dating back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In making the bespoke tea service, Barbadian potter Hamilton Wiltshire has not fully incorporated the implanted shards into the clay, leaving intentional gaps and imperfections, thus allowing the bush tea to escape through the fractured space.
Annalee Davis, (bush) Tea Services, 2016. Photo by Tim Bowditch.
Annalee Davis, (bush) Tea Services, 2016. Photo by Tim Bowditch.
The collected remains of the landscape are present in performance as incomplete fragments of memory, materiality and evocation. It is within the fractured and contested spaces of tangible and intangible memory that the work of critical memory is produced. The critic Houston Baker Jnr. makes an important distinction between nostalgia and critical memory. Whilst nostalgia is a backward looking activity, critical memory engages in a practice, which investigates the past to identify the traces and residues that are hidden in the present.
Davis’ (bush) Tea Services presents us with the performance of critical memory that locates the past as liminal space to understand the ways history continues to speak to and inform the present. (bush) Tea Services can be read as part of a larger body of the artist’s work into the contemporary uses of land in her native Barbados and her complex relationship to the land and its colonial history. These challenges are part of Davis’ lived experience living and working on a former plantation and now a working dairy farm. Through the development on ‘the land beneath her feet’, of the Fresh Milk Platform, Davis has been able to produce her own work, whilst also enabling and promoting the practice of Barbadian artists and artists across the Caribbean and beyond. Boldly challenging the inheritances of the land – as rooted and bound to colonial history – (bush) Tea Services is a meditation on the uses and productions of land and global production of the Caribbean as an imaginary landscape. Davis’ use of critical memory engages the viewer into a series of contemplations on the transgressions, silences and denials that have taken place in the land, through ownership and rituals of exclusion and belonging. It becomes a process of homing/un-homing that is always subject to disruption, re-making and negotiation, informed by tangible and intangible legacies of Empire. In speaking to the continuing impact of empire and its contributions to the processes of globalisation, (bush) Tea Services is part of a wider ‘botanical turn’ within contemporary global art practices; a critical practice that investigates the impacts and erosions of globalisation, through the materiality of ecology and botany.
Annalee Davis, (Bush) Tea Services, 2016. Photo by Tim Bowditch.
[i] Jill Casid, Sowing for Empire: Landscape and Colonization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004
[ii] Thus within the Caribbean landscape – very few indigenous plants, like its people, have survived, what is often characterised as distinctly Caribbean is often a transplant from other soil. For example palm tree, introduced in the early 1550s; june plum (which arrived in Jamaica in 1782), ackee – the national fruit of Jamaica arrived in the island in 1793, Pride of Barbados – its origins are unknown.
[iii] See Judith A Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botantical Legacy in the Atlantic World, University of California Press, Berkely Los Angeles and London, 2009
