She works at the intersection of biography and history, focusing on post-plantation economies by engaging with a particular landscape on Barbados.
Heartseed Exhibition
Heartseed is a suite of drawings on 20th Century ledger pages that examines post/plantation dynamics. Offering counterpoints to fixed constructs of the plantation as a closed site of trauma and exclusivity allows for the critical reconsideration of an intertwined space, attuning land with plantation history.
On Being Committed to a Small Place
On Being Committed to a Small Space is the fifth book in the Local Scriptures series - Critical positions from Central America, the Caribbean and its diasporas - an editorial project of TEOR / ÉTica focused on thinking about how the ways of seeing and doing art in the region have been transformed during the last four decades. This new book continues with our objective of making accessible a selection of several of the most relevant speeches and critical positions that have shaped the critical paradigms in Central America and the Caribbean.
Second Spring
While on a Reed Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in the Fall of 2019, I produced a group of six drawings collectively titled Second Spring, to elucidate the shifting interior terrains in the post-reproductive female body.
Parasite Series
This suite of drawings of parasites is inspired both by Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island (1992) and Evelyn O’Callaghan’s introductory text to the fictional 19th century text, With Silent Tread (2002). Benitez-Rojo writes of the “parasitical presence of the island’s sugar-producing history” and “its laborious intestinal history” while O’Callaghan articulates ways in which “white creoles were viewed with suspicion” due to “the fear of miscegenation... addressed indirectly by the use of the trope, disease.”
Post Reproductive Breasts Sprouting Queen Anne’s Lace
This suite of eight pairs of post-reproductive breasts builds on the Second Spring series of drawings which elucidate the shifting interior terrains in the post-reproductive female body. As I continue exploring ageing from the perspective of a woman, these images reference sagging breasts in the older female body, a time in our lives when we can choose to see ourselves more clearly.
(bush) Tea Plots - A Decolonial Patch
As this COVID-19 moment forces us to rethink sustainable futures in the context of small nations, how might we reconsider the potential of wild botanicals, often disregarded as roadside weeds to be sprayed with pesticides? The local slow food movement in Barbados, for example, is noticing a trend in some of our chefs who envision inventive ways to include some of these wild plants into their menus; organic farmers sell Amaranth, pussley and fat pork at Cheapside market. Is this an example of a post-plantation economy whereby historically fatigued landscapes might become sites of genesis and regeneration? Uncultivated botanical growth may offer counterpoints to plantations as fixed sites of trauma, violence, and exclusivity, allowing reconciliation with the land and the virtual slaughterhouse that lies below it.
Archaeology below the Cliff
A detail from the 2014 work, Saccharum officinarum; Queen Anne's Lace is on the cover of this first book-length archaeological study of a non elite white population on a Caribbean plantation. Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society, is written by Matthew C. Reilly, assistant professor of anthropology at the City College of New York and a collaborator with Annalee Davis on the Unearthing Voices interdisciplinary project.
As if the Entanglement of our Lives Did Not Matter
We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. (pp. 27)
The evolution of our “selves” is already polluted by histories of encounter. (pp.29)
—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World - On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin, 2015)