Practising Agape: Art Sale for Gaza
These past weeks, the world has witnessed the raw and unabated violence inflicted on civilians impacted by the Israel-Hamas war. The world carries an immense sense of grief, fear, despondency, and impotence. Witnessing the war’s effect on women, children, and innocent people in Gaza has shaken the principles of universal human rights. The fathomless harm - physical and psychological - inflicted on the children of Gaza in particular, cannot be debated or assuaged by any reason or discourse. Doctors, working courageously in the most tragic environments, are putting patients before themselves, demonstrating the true meaning of agape.
In this same spirit of agape, I will join the growing global community of compassion to aid brave medics in bringing care to many innocent victims. I am offering a suite of fourteen drawings from my series, Drift, of which 40% of the proceeds will be contributed to Médecins Sans Frontières, (Doctors Without Borders) operating in the most difficult of conditions inside Gaza. Drift was exhibited at the Centre For Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow, Scotland in 2022 as part of the joint show lightly, tendrils, curated by Alaya Ang. For a limited time, these works will be available at a special rate of USD 1,600.00 per drawing, plus shipping costs from Barbados via international courier.
If you would like to acquire a drawing, please email annaleedavis@gmail.com and specify which drawings/s you would like to purchase by using the identifying number in the lower left corner of the images on my temporary webpage. Payment can be made using PayPal.
Once the sale has closed, a one-time donation will be made to Médecins Sans Frontières who will share a receipt within four weeks of the donation having been gifted and processed. Feel free to share this campaign with others. Donors are required to have a PayPal account but if you don’t please contact me at the above email to inquire about an alternative option.
View MSF letter of authorisation here.
About the Art Works
Mixed media on paper, 2022
14 drawings each @ 25" x 17 3/4"
Details shown below
As Bill Maurer writes, the ultimate authority of map-making orders spatial reality as a mode of power, a kind of “space discipline” grounded in the authority of accuracy, which “creates an ethic and virtue of ever more precise definition.” While maps desocialise the territory they represent, these drawings aim to humanise a landscape and its watery boundaries.
Sea Coconuts, Tropical Almond, White Inkberry, and Anchovy Pear – common names for some of the drift seeds or sea beans referred to as a kind of diaspore in botanical terminology that functions as plant dispersal – are in fact seeds that have drifted many thousands of miles on the world’s ocean currents. Varied species of Sargasso weed wash onto both the Caribbean and Scottish coastlines. In the latter, it has a history of being used to bolster poor soils and extract iodine while in the former, more recent warming seas, Sahara dust, and an increased nitrogen footprint foster seaweed invasions in Barbados, threatening its fragile post-plantation, tourism-dependent economy, and coastal health.
While researching Scottish and Barbadian historic entanglements, I learned that midwives in the Highlands gathered nicker nuts drifting in on the Gulf Stream, offering them to labouring women to hold in their hands “to increase her faith and distract her attention”. (Flora Celtica, Pp. 70).
Fishing, kelping, and weaving–common habits in The Highlands–might also have been practiced in Barbados amongst the indentured and other Scottish folks recognising Scotland in the hilly terrain on the East Coast of Barbados and naming it the Scotland District. Former indentured servants settled here on this inexpensive land at the end of their indentureship. I wonder if Scottish women who landed here between the 17th and 19th centuries welcomed a fleeting sense of familiarity on finding similar sea fruit, non-human kin that washed up on the east coast of this small isle almost two thousand miles away from home.
Drift gestures to another kind of mapping referencing sea fruits floating in on these shores for centuries who, like the human diaspora, unwittingly were part of a global transit system germinating in new soils.
