She works at the intersection of biography and history, focusing on post-plantation economies by engaging with a particular landscape on Barbados.
(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.
(bush) Tea Services
The tea service was made in collaboration with master potter Hamilton Wiltshire, using local red clay from the Scotland District on the East Coast of Barbados. Davis’ (bush) tea, was harvested from former sugarcane fields and rab lands from which she has served cerasee bush tea, bay leaf tea and blue vervain tea amongst others.
Portraits of a White Creole Family
This work presents a portrait of a 21st century, white Creole Barbadian family. Twenty-five stands, cut from a single evergreen Ficus tree, are the support bases for posts which in turn each hold an acrylic, laser cut portrait of my immediate family members. The transparency of the material references the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of the twenty-five profiled white Creole portraits within the context of contemporary Caribbean society.
Show me your status
Show me your status presents a recording of a woman from St. Vincent who recounts her experience of being approached on a mini bus by three immigration officials and one police officer and of being publicly humiliated by being asked to show her status.
Caution!!
In 2009, I developed a project using an abolitionist poster from 1851. The broadside was originally posted in the streets as a warning to the Coloured People of Boston and was in opposition to the Fugitive Slave law of 1850 that was a threat to all African Americans. The law required citizens to help catch runaways and warned that those who aided a fugitive could be fined or imprisoned. An interracial group formed the Boston Committee of Vigilance and issued the poster to alert free African-Americans to the presence of Policemen who were acting as Slave Catchers and Kidnappers.
Hatchlings – A Requiem
Hatchlings - A Requiem, situates the fifteen member countries as insular national states, lying on a bed of the shredded Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas.
Sweet Island Cookie Cutters – Sweet Fuh So!
In 2007, Sweet Island Cookie Cutters – Sweet Fuh So! was commissioned for Happy Island – Encuentro Bienal Contemporaneo Di Caribe in Aruba, curated by Jose Manuel Noceda. Later, in 2012 – 2013 it was included in the Caribbean: Crossroads of the World exhibition and displayed at El Museo del Barrio, curated by Elvis Fuentes. In 2014, it was included in a revised version of Caribbean: Crossroads of the World at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), curated by Elvis Fuentes and Tobias Ostrander.
Just beyond My Imagination
The title of this work is adapted from the Barbados Board of Tourism’s marketing slogan “BARBADOS – Just Beyond Your Imagination”. Having hosted the Golf World Cup Championships in December 2006, complete with international ESPN coverage, the small island developing state of Barbados (21 x 14 miles) saw the island transforming into an international golfing center.
Barbados in a Nutshell
Barbados in a Nutshell is a satirical cross-section of a small-island state rapidly shifting from an economy based on agriculture to a tourist destination. The piece presents a souvenir display of ways in which we have been mapped from the seventeenth century until now. In the past we were mapped by others and for others. Now we map ourselves for others. Consequently we find it difficult to locate ourselves. Where do we find the map we so desperately need. Like a syringe inserted into the island’s history, Barbados in a Nutshell displays the innards of the coral island.
Evocations of a Caribbean
Evocations of a Caribbean is a historical series of self-portraits. In this work, I move through space and time to become a Caribbean woman infused with various ethnicities, along with alter-egos represented by corresponding deities. In response to the long tradition of mapping the Caribbean, often in response to the female body, I take back this cartography and use my body to map a female Caribbean, in plural and spiritual terms, and to claim a collective history. I am at once a Karib woman, an English lady and the Virgin Mary, a Yoruba princess and Erzulie, Gong and the Boddishatva etc.
An Alliteration, A Sacred Soliloquy and A Somewhat Sonnet
Three ‘curtained’ spaces comprise disembodied wedding clothes, wire houses and knotted shreds of cotton. On entering the domestic triad, the viewer is invited to wear headsets and listen to alliterative works recited by the artist. Reflections on women as individuals, wife and mother are considered.
(up)rooted
(up)rooted refers to the constantly shifting notions of “home”, reconfigured with every move as human beings navigate their way between longings and belonging. Increasingly, “home” becomes a place carried within, as opposed to a fixed physical locale.
Scarred Dream
Scarred Dream was exhibited at 22nd Bienal de São Paulo under the title Rupture as Support, curated by Nelson Aguilar.
The Things We Worship
In the early nineties, I was responding to heated national debates questioning the future of a landscape caught between a sugar industry with its weighty associations with slavery, sugar production costs that were among the highest in the world and the development of tropical islands as exoticised playgrounds for foreigners, catered to through the development of golf courses, ever grander hotels and possibly casinos. The Things We Worship exposed contradictions that, if left to prevailing market trends, would go unchallenged.