A Walker’s Diary - An Effort at Disalienation
Title
A Walker’s Diary - An Effort at Disalienation
Year
2021
Medium:
Mixed media on Daily Analysis Record sheet from Bulkeley Sugar Factory, mural on gallery wall
Dimensions:
8 drawings each @ 16” X 23”
Photo Credit:
Detailed images: Russell Watson
Exhibition images: Kunsthalle Bratislava
Collector:
Collection of artist
My work responds to and is informed by the history of the plantation where people, plants, and ideas were transplanted and displaced to re-landscape foreign spaces, and generate wealth for the British Empire. My understanding of this place is informed by research, the archives, and walking through this site haunted by its past. A dairy farm today, these lands were once perfectly manicured fields where varieties of sugarcane were carefully bred, planted, harvested, converted to brown crystals, exported in bulk for foreign exchange and to satisfy Europe's desire for sweetness and rum while maintaining a system of wealth for a small segment of the society.
From my relatively privileged position as a 21st-century visual artist aiming to investigate my home for which I have a deep affection, I often ask how I might come to know these burdened lands with restless histories running through them, love this place, walk in step with sites I first learned of through foreign measurements? Can the profound depths of any land ever be measured or owned? How do I listen with another ear, connect with grounds buried beneath ceaseless cadastrals, mappings, sweat, blood, labour, and death? Coursing through these old lands at dawn is one way I have come to know this place. Having walked these bovine-trodden fields for many years, rather than experiencing the terrain on its own terms, I am aware that my understanding of this place has been heavily mediated by centuries of plantation activities. Walking challenges my historically-mediated thinking mind to expand my feeling-heart and experience the fullness of this terra firma beyond forced monoculture practices, human traumas, global marketplaces, and more recent extractive tourist economies.
A Walker's Diary - An Effort at Disalienation presents eight drawings on Daily Analysis Records salvaged from an abandoned sugar factory. Topographic contours form the backdrop for these personal diary-like renderings, appropriating their surfaces and countering their economic rationale allowing counter knowledge to emerge.
Opposing the practice of the plantation overseer, my own effort at disalienation inspired by walking includes drawing inexact, uncertain, and subjective cartographic expressions prompted by the practice of ‘innerseeing’ this multivocal ground beneath my feet. Roaming, listening with another ear, and looking have become intimate acts of moving my aging body through these radically modified environments, provoking an interest in post-extractive ethics, prompting a sense of care for and forging intentional relationships with where we are.
View of work at the exhibition “Potential Agrarianisms: Will There Still Be Sugar After the Revolution?” at Kunsthalle Bratislava
