Annalee Davis - La Biennale di Venezia, 2026

In Minor Keys, 61st International Art Exhibition. On view in the Corderie, Arsenale 2026

Annalee Davis presents new and recent works exploring ecological memory, botanical knowledge, and post-plantation futures in the Caribbean.

(i) Let This Be My Cathedral‍ ‍

Collection Title: Let This Be My Cathedral (detail)

Medium: Lead cast of Eskimo Curlew shot down in Barbados in September 1963, reconstructed from high-resolution photogrammetry recording

Year: 2026

Made in collaboration with Factum Foundation

Photo credit: Oak Taylor-Smith, Factum Arte

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Let This Be My Cathedral (2026) is a new installation reflecting on species loss and ecological memory, grounded in the story of the Eskimo curlew—the last recorded sighting of which in Barbados occurred in 1963.

A multimedia installation anchored in ecological grief, colonial memory, and reverential acts, Let This Be My Cathedral offers a sanctum for critical meditation on biodiversity loss and the emotional and environmental residues of the plantationocene. Through a composite of organic material including fronds, leaves, inflorescences, seeds and pods, a to-scale lead cast of a now- extinct Eskimo curlew resting on a hand-embroidered and dyed shroud, a Damask covered seating area, the transfer of 17th-century drawings of Royal Palms burnished on the floor, and the poem Birdshooting Season by Jamaica’s poet laureate Olive Senior, Let this be my Cathedral proposes a contemplative space where remembrance, ritual, and renewal converge, inviting viewers to pause, mourn and be inspired.

Collection Title: Let This Be My Cathedral 

Medium: Pressed plants for the herbarium including (1) Banana leaf + male flower  [Musa x]; (2) Cerasee [Momordica charantia]; (3) Sea Grape [Coccoloba uvifera] & Wild anthurium [Anthurium willdenowii];  (4) Motherwort [Leonurus japonicus]; (vii) .

Year: 2026

Photo credit: RStudio

Embedded in Barbados’ natural and cultural history, the work emerges from several interrelated historical, contemporary, environmental, and personal reference points:

(i) The Great Clearing (1650–1665) – a catastrophic era of deforestation throughout the British and French Caribbean that permanently altered the region’s ecology.

(ii) The extinction of the Eskimo curlew (Numenius Borealis) in Barbados on September 4th, 1963, by sporting shooting, marked the end of a species of bird once so abundant it darkened the skies of the Americas. Assumed as the last of its species, its wide-scale slaughter and subsequent demise mostly took place in North America before its mistaken shooting in Barbados in a flock of Golden plover.

Let This Be My Cathedral (A resting place for the Eskimo curlew)

Medium: Embroidered and dyed linen shroud with appliquéd coconut sheath

Year: 2026

Photo credit: RStudio

(iii) The small garden surrounding my home and studio from which I have gathered, pressed, and dried organic materials and which inspires the notion of this site as a cathedral.

(iv) A call to love and finding delight, even as we face ongoing environmental collapse and emotional fatigue.

Together, these references articulate an ecology of loss, vulnerability, and fortitude, interrogating the ways in which the Caribbean has been shaped by both centuries of devastating deforestation, violent colonial practices, and acts of devotion. The semi-circular-shaped sanctuary is presented as a secular cathedral rooted in postcolonial memory and a present-day urge to take care of what is broken.

Title: Let This Be My Cathedral (detail)

Medium: The artist's studio with hanging plants

Year: 2026

Photo credit: RStudio

 Title: Let This Be My Cathedral (detail)

Medium: Annalee Davis embroidering in her garden

Year: 2026

Photo credit: RStudio

(ii) An Unbound Book of Prayer- Series II

Collection Title: An Unbound Book of Prayer, Series II (A selection of individual pieces plus two groupings)

Year: 2025 - 2026

Medium: Appliqué, crochet, organic material & embroidery on linen

Dimensions: 30 cm x 40 cm

Photo credit: RStudio

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An Unbound Book of Prayer- Series II (2025–2026) is a series of small textile works crafted with appliqué, crochet, embroidery, dyes, and organic materials gathered from the surrounding landscape of my home and studio, shaping these secular devotional aids. 

They respond to a very specific piece of land–the place where I live and work and where my paternal family has lived for five generations. My practice motions to this site’s former incarnation as a seventeenth-century sugar plantation, transformed to a twentieth-century dairy farm currently under transition to an alternate energy farm. This land is at once a witness to history, a tomb, an archive, a regenerator of life, and the place that grounds me–it is a site of belonging and one worthy of veneration.

The material reality of the landscape is evident in the coconut sheath, bird feathers, sea fan, palm tree inflorescence, seeds, and bamboo branches. The making of them quells my anxiety about the ecological and geopolitical angst many of us feel. Unhurried, repetitive meditative stitching would slow my breath, and I would become calmer. 

I intend them as a series of daily devotional aids countering the alienation many in the Caribbean feel in relation to a land mediated for more than four centuries by the colonial project’s plantation model, monocrop farming of sugar cane, and organised religion, or the more recent touristification of this archipelago sitting in the belly of the Americas. The series aims to facilitate a relationship with the living world through these secular meditational devices, honouring what grows locally as worthy of attention and worship, suggesting a relationship with a living land that offers possibilities for renewal, rather than dominion over landscapes.

(iii) Be Soft

Title: Be Soft

Year:  2023-24

Medium: Embroidery on a 100-year-old piece of Klöppeln (German lace making)

Dimensions: 30 cm diameter

Photo credit:  Marvin Systermans, Spore Initiative

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Be Soft. Unhurriedly created, Be Soft is a meditative work acknowledging the climate crisis as both external and internal. A strategy for feeling calm in its making, this circular work extends an invitation for slow-looking, reminiscent of and inspired by the bounty and sacrality of the living world and referencing plants growing outside of my temporary studio while on a 2023 residency at Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany.

The use of embroidery acknowledges British sewing traditions that Barbadian women across race and class inherited and practised over centuries, instilling notions of femininity. Rather than producing decorative works for the living room, once the prescribed domain of women, or adorning the surfaces of dressing tables, this slowly made work acknowledges the urgency of these climatic times and the corresponding need to move softly on the earth, our shared mother.