Gardening in the Tropics, Evelyn O’Callaghan, This Ground Beneath my Feet - A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands catalogue text, 2016
Roots of the rhizomatic monocrop dangle into a tea cup in reference to English abolitionist Robert Southy’s claim that tea was a blood sweetened beverage–made from products grown on plantations in the East and in the West Indies. The Queen Anne’s Lace infers human interconnectivity across race and class, an interweaving of lives reinforced by the excerpt of Thomas Applewhaite’s 1815 will in which he speaks about his ‘little favourite slave girl’ more than anyone else in his last will and testament.
This suite of eight drawings articulates the plantation through the lens of gender and the familial, integrating the domestic labour of women, including the act of crocheting, sweeping and making tea, into the overall landscape. Aerial views of the topography of two plantations–Cliff and Walkers–sites where I have spent much of my life, are suspended in between maps of sugar cane fields and dairy farm lands, pieces of Queen Anne’s Lace, the rhizomatic root structure of the sugar cane plant and and 18th & 19th-century sherds defying gravity. These ceramic remains include 18th and 19th century pearlware and cream ware, manufactured in English factories and which I continually find underfoot in former sugar cane fields centuries later.
A rattoon of the sugar cane plant floats over a porcelain tea cup in reference to English abolitionist Robert Southy’s description of the common British cup of tea as a ‘blood-sweetened beverage’ while the words of Thomas Applewhaite in his last will and testament of 1815, offer manumission six years after his death to his ‘favorite slave girl, Frances.” Collectively, these drawings complicate the multiple layers of the plantation.
“As such, the plants create an alternative reading of the plantation landscape, a redemptive story out of the toxic history recorded in the soil. Davis’s ecological knowledge, in other words, works towards creating a sense of belonging that includes ownership, quite literally, of the diverse plantation histories buried in the ground beneath her feet by telling them in a way that works against the hierarchical and imperial structures she has inherited through her family history.
In Shards, however, she undermines the layered hierarchy by drawing the coloured shards of pottery formerly contained in the soil (their ghostly imprints can still be seen) in the sky, above a sugarcane plant. She subverts the monoculture history of the plantation, symbolized by the sugarcane, by elevating the fragments of other stories into a position of visibility that challenges the power and status of the cane and, by extension, colonial and postcolonial plantation history.”
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, First published in the Journal of West Indian Literature, 2017, Melanie Otto
