Ledger Drawings

Artwork
Written By Annalee Davis

Title
Ledger Drawings: 1975 Crop

Year
2016

Medium:
Mixed media on plantation ledger pages

Dimensions:
21" x 15"

Photo Credit:
Mark King

Collector:
Collection of artist

Likewise, in the Ledger Drawings and Wild Plants series she gives primacy to the drawn line, emphasized by its dominant colour red, over the faint handwriting on the plantation ledgers. In this way, her drawings overwrite the monoculture of the plantation and its history with plants that attest to the bio- and cultural diversity of Barbados and, by extension, plantation America.

Excerpt from 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, Journal of West Indian Literature, 2017, Melanie Otto

The substrate for these drawings is the plantation ledger page. Countering the conventional daily logging of economic plantation activity, I inscribe other images offering alternative ways of reading the site where I live and work. My attempt to decolonise the ledger by repopulating and complicating these ledgers is a kind of civic negotiation, exposing gaps in Barbados’ plantation history buried in the soil, in the public imaginary and inadequately documented in the archives.

Saccharum officinarum and Queen Anne’s Lace  (2016)
Latex on Plantation Ledger Pages 
70"(H) x 81"(W)

(Photo credit: Mark King)

I began this work by drawing a piece of Queen Anne’s lace on my studio wall, taking the pattern from a piece my mother had been crocheting intermittently over a fifty year period. Next to it, I drew the rattoon of a sugar cane plant with an exaggerated rhizomatic root structure that looked like the inner workings of a pair of lungs. The sugar cane plant started to breathe and the two forms began to negotiate their boundaries and reach out to each other. The images rerouted themselves to suggest in a Glissantian way that identity is not solely within the root itself but becomes more alive in relation with the other. My father was a planter and my mother was a bookkeeper and homemaker - what I had drawn was a portrait of my parents.

Annalee Davis
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Archipelagic Affinities in an Ocean of Shifting Tides

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Wild Plant Series