*A Scroll of Banished Women,* 2022
Screenprint and laser-cut woodblock print on Atsu Shi 67gsm paper , 44 x 98cm

Solo exhibition

20th September 2022 -
14th October, 2022

Commissioned by the Facing Our Past project, National Trust for Scotland.

The Steadings Gallery, Balmacara Estate

Read more through my series of blog posts for the NTS website:

Part 1: Contesting Landscapes: creative interventions at Balmacara Estate

Part 2: Contesting Landscapes: ‘We ghost the past, we are its eerie.’

Part 3: Contesting Landscapes: A Hymn to the Banished

The exhibition, A Hymn to the Banished explores connections between Scotland and Barbados through a newly commissioned artwork as part of the National Trust for Scotland’s ongoing mission to face the legacies of slavery and empire in its properties. Held in Balmacara Square on the Trust’s estate at the Steadings Gallery, this limited edition box set of print works takes this landscape as a historic point of departure, drawing a thread from 1800 when Francis Humberston MacKenzie, landowner of Lochalsh and Kintail in northwest Scotland, became Governor of Barbados. Known as Britain’s first sugar isle, its economic prosperity was built upon the labour of enslaved African people, white indentured servants, both men and women, and the sugar trade.

A Hymn to the Banished insinuates an interlacing of imperial linkages between Barbados and Scotland, inferring centuries of social disruption caused by the plantation system and the colonial project. With the forced transplantation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved African people and numerous Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English indentured labourers, systems of knowledge and rituals crossed the world’s ocean currents, building new cultures in the foreign lands of the West Indies.

British imperialism imposed banishment and generated suffering. Yet, deep knowledge and a desire to heal profound traumas elicited practices that relied on ancient traditions connected to the land and the remembering of sacred rites. Annalee Davis’s bespoke box lined with a fishnet captures and holds handmade books, a scroll of banished women, a container of charms, and other pieces. This limited edition explores notions of rupture, friction, entanglements, and the need to belong in strange places through rituals of incantations, charms, and the desire to repair the ills of British Empire-era indentureship and slavery.

A Hymn to the Banished is a secular prayer in the form of a visual meditation recognising the intuition, knowledge, customs, and tenacity of our forbears and their capacity to confront and survive cruel, brutal conditions.

Final pieces shown below. Click to enhance size. For further details please consult this document.