Patchwork: Essays & Interviews on Caribbean Visual Culture

By Jacqueline Bishop

The patchwork is an apt metaphor for the region not only because of its colourfulness and the making of something whole out of fragments but as an attempt to make coherence out of disorder. The seeking of coherence was the exact process of putting together this book and foregrounds the process of Caribbean societies forging identity and identities out of plural and at times conflicting and contested groups that came to call the region home.

Within the metaphor of the patchwork however is the question, where are the vernacular needlework artists within the visual art tradition of the Caribbean? The introduction sets out to both clarify and rectify this situation, and several common themes flow through the following essays and interviews. Themes include that that the land and colonization remain baseline issues for several Caribbean artists who stage and restage the history of conquest and empire in varying ways. That artists in the region amalgamate as part of their practice and seem to prefer an open-endedness to art making as opposed to expressing fidelity to a particular medium. That artists and scholars alike are dismantling long-held perceptions of what Caribbean art is thought to be, and are challenging boundaries in Caribbean art. 

These are among the issues addressed in the book as it looks at ecological concerns and questions of sustainability, how the practices of the artists and their art defy the easy categorization of the region, and the placement of women in the visual art ecology of the Caribbean. The latter is one of the most contested areas of the book. Readers should come away with the sense that questions of race, colour, and class loom large within questions of gender in the Jamaican art scene and that the book, dedicated to Sane Mae Dunkley, aims to insert vernacular needleworkers into the visual art scene in both Jamaica and the larger Caribbean.

Audience will include researchers and scholars of Caribbean and African diasporic art, college students, those interested in post-colonial studies, Caribbean artists, art professionals interested in a wider, globalized view of contemporary art; students curious to know about the many phases of art production throughout the Caribbean. General readers interested in the culture of the region.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Oct 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789386486

Jacqueline Bishop

Jacqueline Bishop is an award-winning photographer, painter and writer born and raised in Jamaica, who now lives and works in New York City

Book preview

Introduction

To begin a discussion of how this volume came about, I have to speak about my own intimate influences as a visual artist. It is clear to me now that the interviews that I was conducting and publishing with practitioners and scholars of Caribbean art and the platform afforded me at the Huffington Post for close to five years, where I shone a spotlight on women in the visual arts, whether as artists, curators, or academics, was following in a long family tradition of piece work—utilizing the patchwork aesthetic of my foremothers—in trying to create a whole out of bits and pieces. Consequently, in order to understand a volume like this—one in which a practicing visual artist systematically sets out to be an art writer, critic, and interviewer—this volume has to be placed within the context of the vernacular creative tradition of my family.

My strongest influences as a visual artist came from family members—my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother—all of whom hail from a tiny district called Nonsuch, hidden deep in the massive undulating purple/blue Portland mountains on the island of Jamaica. To this day when you speak to the people in Nonsuch in Portland, in deep rural Jamaica, who knew my great-grandmother, they describe her as a work of art unto herself, a woman who never wore matching socks, and who patchworked even her husband’s work clothes and filled their home with hand-made collages culled from magazines and newspapers. Nothing ever went to waste with Celeste. Bits and pieces of leftover cloths from dressmakers became patchworks that found their way onto beds. These patchworks that she made were NOT FOR EVERYDAY USE. Rather, the everyday-use bedspreads were precisely the ones that were bought at the store. The patchwork bedspreads that she sat up and made by lamplight (before electricity came to Nonsuch) were the Christmas Day bed linen; the ones invited guests got to see when they came over; the ones that were put on the bed when people from abroad were coming. They were works of art. It saddens me that when she died at home her work was considered of so little importance to those around her that the two biggest and best patchworks she made were used to wrap her body in and take to the morgue, where they were of course discarded as nothing of value. The few pieces of her work that I eventually got, would go on to form the basis of my own work. I am, like my great grandmother and my grandmother, a patchworker. Someone who is always piecing things together to form a larger whole. This book too is a patchwork.

Colour photograph of Celeste Walker holding up one of her patchworks.

Figure I.1: Photograph of Celeste Walker. © Georgia Blair-Mangat, n.d.

My great grandmother and later my grandmother used patchwork as memory devices. Many pieces of cloth used in their work bore traces from former lives and for my great grandmother specific colors were assigned to family members, more so the ones who had migrated. Both my great grandmother and my grandmother were using patchwork and a patchwork aesthetic to tell a larger non-linear story, which is precisely what I found myself doing as I read through the essays and interviews in this collection. In so doing, themes started arising organically, themes that reflect the history of the Caribbean and having to do with such charged and contested issues as the importance of place in Caribbean art, the questioning of women’s role in Caribbean art, in addition to looking at how artists in the Caribbean are challenging boundaries and defying easy categorizations. This volume lays out some of the broad trends in Caribbean visual culture and calls into question some of the notable absences.

A colour photograph of a patchwork with green fabric and pink flowers.

Figure I.2: Patchwork. © Celeste Walker, n.d. Image by Jacqueline Bishop.

Patchwork as metaphor, the seeking to create order and make whole out of bits and pieces and the left over, is an apt metaphor for the Caribbean a whole—a region formed out of a history of colonization and conquest, a region which saw various groups of individuals brought in to work the land. It should be no surprise then that the land and colonization remain baseline issues for several Caribbean artists who stage and restage the history of conquest and empire in varying ways invoking the land. La Vaugh Belle, and Alicia Brown, for example, offer counter narratives to the colonial narratives handed down to them. In so doing they seek to challenge and refute a history that for too long was based on the Empire’s view of the Caribbean and of the land. The metaphor of the patchwork can also be seen in the various processes that artists in the region amalgamate as part of their practice. Garfield Morgan sums it up best when he states that artists seem to prefer an open-endedness to art making and very few artists, except for maybe painters, express fidelity for a particular medium in creating their works of art. The work being made dictates the medium. Meanwhile, artists and scholars alike take up the mantle of dismantling long-held perceptions of what Caribbean art is thought to be and who is it that makes that art. Llanor Alleyne, as an openly queer artist, presents work and a voice not often heard from in Caribbean art discourses and she is among those who are challenging boundaries in Caribbean art.

A colour photograph of multi-colored patchwork consisting of floral fabric.

Figure 1.3: Patchwork. © Emma Chin-See, n.d. Image by Jacqueline Bishop.

An especially contested and often overlooked issue that comes to the forefront in the collection is the place of popular traditions, specifically popular needlework traditions, that are often excluded from any discussion of Caribbean visual cultures. It is here that the image of the patchwork becomes especially relevant.

A colour photograph of a large patchwork consisting of various fabrics.

Figure I.4: Patchwork. © Theresa Walker, 2018. Image by Jacqueline Bishop.

The work of Sane Mae Dunkey, who died right at the moment when her hand-made large kaleidoscopic mats were becoming known, tracks the impact of race, color, gender, and class on creative works produced within Jamaica. While several of the interviews and essays here speaks to the societal pressures that female artists face as wives, mothers, and caretakers, which in turn affects women’s artistic trajectories, Dunkley’s work falls outside conventional definitions of art and who is considered an artist and forefronts the fact that there has been a general lack of scholarly attention on creators like her. Dunkley’s work exemplifies the often voiceless and wordless experience of textile and other vernacular fiber-makers who more often than not are classified as craft artisans where sharp and pointed distinctions between crafts and fine arts are usually drawn and reinforced. As Dr. Steeve Buckridge points out in his interview needle workers in Jamaica […] have been marginalized, silenced, forgotten, or absent from the history books. As such, a somewhat contradictory experience of women as visual art producers can be seen in the volume mediated through the lens of race, color, and class. The women who had attained formal secondary and tertiary education and training as visual artists speak for themselves and often negate the role of gender as having any impact on their reception as artists in the volume; while Sane Mae Dunkley, encumbered by not having formal education or training as a visual artist, is spoken of and for and perhaps would not be fully accorded the title of visual artist even by trained female artists.

In plain terms, this volume asks, where are artists like Sane Mae Dunkley in the patchwork of Caribbean visual art and culture, especially in recent major exhibitions staged on Caribbean art? Her exclusion and the exclusion of all artists like her speak volumes. Dunkley’s work draws solidly upon the Creole esthetic of the Caribbean and references the sub-Saharan African narrow weave strip loom tradition with its emphasis on vivid displays and clashing colors. When interviewed she noted that it was a male member of the family who she grew up seeing doing embroidery and needlework referencing men as the prestige textile makers in sub-Saharan African culture, a tradition that often got re-scrambled with colonial contact under slavery. Dunkley engaged with icons of Jamaican nationalism by at times working in the Jamaican flag colors. Her work is at once markedly African-derived and highly Creolized. It is a key representation of the plurality of the region and opens up many fascinating areas of inquiry.

As artists and scholars take up the mantle of disrupting facile and exotic images of the Caribbean, one of the main challenges will be to make sure that creators such as Sane Mae Dunkley become more than descriptive markers in the work of fine artists in and from the region but are in fact woven into the tapestry of Caribbean art and visual culture and seen as visual artists in their own right. As such, the volume showcases many of the contemporary and yet longstanding issues that visual artists are tackling in new and fascinating ways. Olivia McGilchrist, whose biography situates her both in the old and the new world mines the floor of the Atlantic ocean as an archive to create Caribbean Futures largely absent in Virtual Reality Technologies. Her beautiful mesmeric immersive environment is an amalgamation of images, a piecing together, a patchwork. McGilchrist’s work is in direct conversation with those of Dunkleys and those of my grandmother and my great grandmother’s all of whom utilized patchwork to tackle and advance very complex ideas and realities. Woven throughout all the essays and interviews in this book and within Caribbean space is the leitmotif of the patchwork.

The Importance of Place

1

Wendy Nanan Talks about the Importance of Place in Her Works

In one of her earlier bodies of work, My Idyllic Marriage, the artist Wendy Nanan sought to come to terms with her home country of Trinidad as a place of the intermingling of cultures. Nanan says, Here in Trinidad we have La Divina Pastora, a very dark image that Indians worship. But what is so interesting about La Divina is that Hindus and Catholics share her, as well. What the artist would end up doing is taking two statues that are venerated by two different religious traditions and encasing them in their own house so that they could learn to live together. That, for me, is the reality of what it means to be Trinidadian, the artist says.

Finding one’s place and claiming that place are central to the work that Nanan does. Nanan was born into an Indian family in Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad, where her father was a businessman and her mother worked alongside him in the business. She has four brothers and three sisters, all of whom would go on to attend university. Nanan admits that while growing up, her father did not know much about art. But that did not prevent him from encouraging his daughter’s artistic leanings. My father would sit outside and wait for me as I walked around in museums, she says.

In high school, Nanan would be introduced to a new art teacher from England who, she says, opened my eyes to art and encouraged her to think broadly about it. After finishing high school she went on to do a bachelor’s degree in England before returning to Trinidad to settle down and work.

When I came back to Trinidad from England I really struggled a lot as an artist and a person. I struggled to understand where I fit in the society, but I also struggled as an artist. Our art traditions are large enough, I believe, to encompass everyone, but it seemed that there was a preference for naïve/touristic kinds of work as opposed to the more trained and contemporary works that I was doing. Unfortunately, I think that this spilt still exists in our society, and it is very unfortunate.

If Nanan struggled because of the more trained work that she was doing, she also struggled in her society by being an Indian woman artist.

People just weren’t used to it back when I was leaving high school in the 1960s. People just weren’t used to a young Indian woman working on murals or making art. Because of this I was always seen as strange, and it was not that I was even the first Indian woman artist in Trinidad! For me the struggle was many-fold because I had to struggle to say who I am in a colonial place, and there were class restrictions as well. If you were a middle-class person—a middle-class woman—you should have certain goals of wanting to get married and raising a family, which were never my goals. Instead, I was very focused on trying to understand the place that I call home.

In that regard, one event that particularly stood out for her happened when the West Indies cricket team beat England’s cricket team in a match. It seemed to Nanan that the slaves had taken over the master’s game and she found herself going to cricket matches at the Oval, where she started doing a series of drawings that would morph into automatic drawings, drawing the cricket scenes without looking at the paper or the ink before her, but instead keeping her eyes focused solely on the game. I think that was perhaps the best work I have ever done, the artist says. Those cricket drawings. I developed a way of drawing without thinking. My hand just drew what I saw. I gave my mind up, my thought process up, and I just flowed with the process.

All the while she was working hard to break into what she calls the all-boys system of buyers and collectors and government people responsible for collecting art on the island of Trinidad.

A colour photograph of two hanging seashell pods.

Figure 1.1: Pods, 2019, set of 6, each 36 inches × 12 inches × 6 inches, papier-mache. Image by Fabian Goncalves Borrega.

A colour photograph of figures holding hands.

Figure 1.2: Idyllic Marriage, 1990. 21 inches × 15 inches × 4 inches, mixed media. Image by Fabian Goncalves Borrega.

In fact, the My Idyllic Marriage series of works would see Nanan in 1989 get her first solo exhibition at the National Gallery in Trinidad. I guess I was granted the show, the artist reflects,

because I used our traditional forms in the making of the work and I made references to aspects of our culture that any Trinidadian could easily grasp. These works still excite me because there is a crudity and honesty to them. I did four baby Krishnas, for example, but now the Krishnas had Christian wings and they were holding things deeply symbolic for Trinidadians—an enamel cup with oil coming out, another one held the doubles that we love to eat in Trinidad. I guess what I was saying with these works is that we have to rely on the things we have invented ourselves on this island and to value what is special to us and indicative of us as Trinidadians.

Given her emphasis on Trinidadian culture and identity, the 50th anniversary of Trinidadian independence in 2012 found the artist wondering how much Trinidad had really changed since gaining Independence from Great Britain. Her conclusion was that there had been very little change since Independence. For one thing, the society, as she sees it, seems to be stuck in class binaries. Nanan’s response to this realization was a quite telling series of heads plastered with stamps, in which she is riffing on the Queen of England.

For her latest body of work, though, Wendy Nanan has gone back to tackling the subject of her placement as an Indian woman artist in Trinidad. But this time the answers she offers are more contemplative and accepting, if not outright bursting with life and fertility. In this latest body of work, she shares, I have taken the viewer with me to some of the places I love to go walking in the mornings. On these walks, I often collect pods and seashells from the beach, and I have been collecting these for years now.

The pods are lined in vegetative-like structures that resemble wombs being lined with eggs which literally seem to be coming off the gallery walls. There is a symbol that looks like a phalanx ready to protect and defend all that is natural. The cycle of life is invoked in these works as is fertility and fecundity and even mortality. There is the sense that the artist has emphatically found her voice.

For me, it was important to find my place in the world and the place I have found for myself in Trinidad. My advice to young artists, especially young Trinidadian artists, is to get out and see all that you can. I think that is very important and I am glad that I left Trinidad for a few years. But for me, Trinidad is where I belong. Of course, I know that people look at me as very foreign and different because of personal choices I have made in my life regarding marriage and children, but still I feel very grounded in Trinidad. The landscape of the country is running through me like a river. I know that road through Manzanilla so well that it feels like my blood running through my veins. I have to be here and claim this place. Trinidad is my place. I think this is what viewers are seeing and sensing in my latest works.

2

Annalee Davis Uses Art to Unearth and Interrogate

For Annalee Davis, the land, especially the island of Barbados, is often a baseline issue in her work; as are issues of race, class, and gender. This might be so because she was born into a large White Creole family of five children on a sugar cane estate in Barbados.

Annalee remembers her childhood as carefree and spent largely outdoors with regular trips to the beach. Both her father and a brother were farmers and she credits that early primary relationship with the land as informing much of the work that she would produce as an artist. She remembers too that when she was a child, there was a Haitian woman who used to visit her parents. This woman was an artist who intrigued her. She liked how the Haitian woman responded to society. The memory of this woman stayed with her for a long time, and, in large part, became the reason why Annalee chose to be an artist.

Annalee Davis’s early schooling on the island was lackluster, in large part because there was not much emphasis on the arts or arts education. As a student, she could find no outlet to express herself in the visual arts and was continually frustrated in her attempts to realize her dream. She would eventually complete high school in Canada, which was a good move for her.

I really enjoyed my time in Canada, because it was here that I started having an understanding of the social and political context of art. In Canada, I was introduced to art history and there was a teacher at the high school I attended who took my desire to be an artist seriously. It was that teacher who suggested that I do my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Maryland Institute College of Art, which was one of the finest art schools in the United States at the time.

At Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Annalee spent a lot of time developing her skills, focusing specifically on drawing, painting, and printmaking. Following her time at MICA, Davis went on to do her Master of Finter Art (MFA) at Rutgers University in New Jersey, which offered proximity to New York and the opportunity to observe the art scene there. Rutgers also had solid art professors, a small student body, huge libraries, and access to numerous resources.

Rutgers was a very rich environment for me and soon a shift started to happen in my work. I started to tackle ideas around gender, race and class. That language began to develop there. I also began to think of myself as a minority. To many people I am just a White Barbadian. It was at Rutgers that I really began to unpack what this all means.

The result of her time at Rutgers can be seen most convincingly in a painting she did around that time entitled Putting on my Blackness in which a lone, White, nude female in a plantation house is putting on what appears to be Black skin. In the background of the house is the British flag. The figure looks out through a window at several Black figures, a plantation with small presumably slave cottages, the wide blue Caribbean ocean, and the flag of Barbados. It is a haunting political work.

For Annalee, being a White Caribbean person means being a member of a misunderstood minority group. In an intervention, called White Creole Conversations, that the artist instigated—a suite of 25 conversations with Caribbean people seen as White—she