She works at the intersection of biography and history, focusing on post-plantation economies by engaging with a particular landscape on Barbados.
Sweet Island Cookie Cutters – Sweet Fuh So!
In 2007, Sweet Island Cookie Cutters – Sweet Fuh So! was commissioned for Happy Island – Encuentro Bienal Contemporaneo Di Caribe in Aruba, curated by Jose Manuel Noceda. Later, in 2012 – 2013 it was included in the Caribbean: Crossroads of the World exhibition and displayed at El Museo del Barrio, curated by Elvis Fuentes. In 2014, it was included in a revised version of Caribbean: Crossroads of the World at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), curated by Elvis Fuentes and Tobias Ostrander.
Just beyond My Imagination
The title of this work is adapted from the Barbados Board of Tourism’s marketing slogan “BARBADOS – Just Beyond Your Imagination”. Having hosted the Golf World Cup Championships in December 2006, complete with international ESPN coverage, the small island developing state of Barbados (21 x 14 miles) saw the island transforming into an international golfing center.
On the Map
On The Map debunks the myth of a unified, “laid back” Caribbean culture and contrasts images of beach, golf course and paradise, with the reality of Caribbean living, victimization and abuse. Un/documented Guyanese migrants tell of their migrant experience into Barbados, exposing how Caribbean people treat Caribbean people as “other”. The film speaks out to create awareness of critical issues to improve the human condition, allowing us to co-exist respectfully.
What Matters
What Matters functions as an enquiry into how we might measure the value of non-physical matter or resources which have intrinsic value, in addition to exploring notions of balance and harmony. The work was inspired after a walk through Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Asia, situated in Mumbai. The scale of deprivation combined with an ability to contain chaos, conjured up ideas of misery, grace, privation, materialism and balance.
Barbados in a Nutshell
Barbados in a Nutshell is a satirical cross-section of a small-island state rapidly shifting from an economy based on agriculture to a tourist destination. The piece presents a souvenir display of ways in which we have been mapped from the seventeenth century until now. In the past we were mapped by others and for others. Now we map ourselves for others. Consequently we find it difficult to locate ourselves. Where do we find the map we so desperately need. Like a syringe inserted into the island’s history, Barbados in a Nutshell displays the innards of the coral island.
Creole Madonna
Creole Madonna asserts a current hybrid Caribbean where identity is plural and interior space multi-cultural. The simply defined self cannot ever fully contain who we are - thus the need to evoke a multiple identity. This work opposes a fragmented status and insists that despite racial, ethnic, religious, generational and all other diverse specificities, there is a shared identity - a hybridity, unconsciously "lived" by millions, both in and outside of the region.
Coming Home to the Self
Feminist Studies, first published in 1972, is the oldest continuing scholarly journal in the field of women's studies published in the U.S. Contents of the journal reflect its commitment to publishing an interdisciplinary body of feminist knowledge, in multiple genres (research, criticism, commentaries, creative work), that views the intersection of gender with racial identity, sexual orientation, economic means, geographical location, and physical ability as the touchstone for its intellectual analysis. Whether drawn from the complex past or the shifting present, the work that appears in Feminist Studies addresses social and political issues that intimately and significantly affect women and men in the United States and around the world.
Evocations of a Caribbean
Evocations of a Caribbean is a historical series of self-portraits. In this work, I move through space and time to become a Caribbean woman infused with various ethnicities, along with alter-egos represented by corresponding deities. In response to the long tradition of mapping the Caribbean, often in response to the female body, I take back this cartography and use my body to map a female Caribbean, in plural and spiritual terms, and to claim a collective history. I am at once a Karib woman, an English lady and the Virgin Mary, a Yoruba princess and Erzulie, Gong and the Boddishatva etc.
From Knots to Medals
Knotty Head is the first work in a series of eight works collectively titled FROM KNOTS TO MEDALS, including Bound to Myself and My Other, Drinking my Own Milk, Letting Go, Trying to Find my Centre, Touching the Void, Stigma and Medals.
This series navigates tangled threads of history allowing a transformation from a fixed sense of self to a shared identity. Knotted pieces of fabric accumulate to signify struggle, release and growth.
An Alliteration, A Sacred Soliloquy and A Somewhat Sonnet
Three ‘curtained’ spaces comprise disembodied wedding clothes, wire houses and knotted shreds of cotton. On entering the domestic triad, the viewer is invited to wear headsets and listen to alliterative works recited by the artist. Reflections on women as individuals, wife and mother are considered.
This Land of Mine: Past, Present and Future
A suite of twelve relief prints tracks the shifting landscape in a small island Caribbean state. The copper images refer to spaces that have archaeological, historical, agricultural and intrinsic value. The middle row of grey images shows the transition via greed to the hot pink images. The copper spaces have in fact become the fast food restaurant, a golf course etc. The future has become the past.
Raw Testimonies
This suite of twelve prints is based on one hundred and fifty interviews of secondary and tertiary school students from Barbadian schools. They were asked to write and draw what their homes felt like emotionally and psychologically. The relief prints are on paper made from bagasse, the by-product of the sugar industry, fostering a link between our relationships with each other and the plantation society.
(up)rooted
(up)rooted refers to the constantly shifting notions of “home”, reconfigured with every move as human beings navigate their way between longings and belonging. Increasingly, “home” becomes a place carried within, as opposed to a fixed physical locale.
Contemporary Middle Passage (here) and (there)
Sixteen feet long and six feet wide, this double sided work on a single piece of paper shows on the (here) side, a woman falling in the abyss, holding onto her umbilicus, trying to situate herself between a island image seen through rose coloured glasses at the foot of the painting, a royal palm and a hand reaching for a rooted home. On the reverse, the woman flies high in the sky, head amongst the birds, luggage trailing behind, suspended in a Caribbean migrant dilemma between here and there.
Rooted with Passion
Created in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica at a Triangle Trust Workshop, this experimental work became the seed for many years of work that explored notions of home, migratory routes and rootedness. It included a series of drawings on paper with a spinal column sprouting wings, nests, birds flying and houses setting down roots in reference to the Caribbean as a migratory space.
Wounded Across all Innocence
The theme of wounds continues in another triptych, this time an explanation is sought with an attempt at healing.
Scarred Dream
Scarred Dream was exhibited at 22nd Bienal de São Paulo under the title Rupture as Support, curated by Nelson Aguilar.
The Things We Worship
In the early nineties, I was responding to heated national debates questioning the future of a landscape caught between a sugar industry with its weighty associations with slavery, sugar production costs that were among the highest in the world and the development of tropical islands as exoticised playgrounds for foreigners, catered to through the development of golf courses, ever grander hotels and possibly casinos. The Things We Worship exposed contradictions that, if left to prevailing market trends, would go unchallenged.