Sweeping the Fields

Title
Sweeping the Fields

Year
2016

Medium:
Performance

Dimensions:
Variable

Photo Credit:
Helen Cammock

Collector:
Collection of artist

Sweeping the Fields is an act of remembering and of cleansing; a contemporary gesture to history’s groan which acknowledges the possibility of an emerging post-plantation apothecary. The action of sweeping, documented through a suite of photographs, developed out of my walking the fields on Walkers dairy farm in Barbados, where I live and work.

Part of a 350-year old colonial history that links the Caribbean with the rest of world, Walkers was operational originally as a sugarcane plantation from the 1660s. It was formerly named Willoughby Plantation after the Eton-educated, English landowner and Governor of Barbados, William Willoughby, who developed the several-hundred-acre estate.

Inspired by the resurgent diversity of an emerging botanical archive asserting itself against a historically imperial landscape, Sweeping the Fields is not meant to conceal the dark secrets of the colonial era. Rather, the goal is to engage with the past through this particular site in interdisciplinary ways; reckon with the weight of a collective, traumatic past and act in ways which move against the grain of history while imagining the possibility of a healthier post-plantation reality and considering what that might look like or mean for contemporary society.

Sweeping the Fields was included in the exhibition Rum Retort in Greenock, Scotland, and was curated by the collective, Mother Tongue in 2016.

A detail from the triptych was later included in re:rural curated by Livvy Penrose of Haarlem Artspace in Wirksworth, UK from September 12 until October 11th 2020.