In Defense of Beauty is a suite of six drawings on 1970s and 1980s plantation ledger pages. Created with latex paint, pencil and, in some cases, gold leaf, depictions of distorted shadows cast by pieces of crochet meander across the neatly delineated rows and columns of the plantation pay list. Suggesting alternative landscapes or floating archipelagos, pieces of eighteenth and nineteenth century porcelain and clay sherds unearthed from former plantation fields infer a fragmented history replete with inconsistencies and fissures.
These delicate, meandering lace-like forms also allude to the presence of women on the plantation, their unpaid labour in the domestic space and a shared desire for elegance and refinement. The graphic interventions proclaim themselves against the red lines and black words printed on fiscal substrates, veiling the bookkeeper’s cursive handwriting that logged wages, rent paid and stoppages.
My inscription of non-transactional images onto the ledgers offers alternative ways of reading the plantation by repopulating, complicating and exposing gaps in shared plantation histories, while enabling different understandings of conflictingly imagined landscapes to be glimpsed. The series refers to a common need for beauty, proposing that post-colonial, post-independence spaces accommodate beauty also.
