Clay Work May 2009

Clay work at the end of semester two.

Drawings May 2009

Images of drawings from the series 'de whitee talks'.

Slab work at Adam Williams' studio

White and red clay slabs with red slip.






Adam with one of his students.

Sacred Slabs

I have moved to clay...drawing, boxing, scripting, pushing and pulling. Clay slabs are tablets. Like sacred Abrahamic texts. It is exciting. I have since incorporated white slip. I will be working with Adam Williams at his studio this weekend. Very exciting!

This box

This box that I am in, does not fit. It is not comfortable. I shall make my own...

Is it a matter of making a new box? Or alleviating it completely? What then happens to the contents of the vessel?

Barely there, can't fit into the square

I don't really fit into the box in the first place. I think I am the only one who knows that.

The Mould

The mould is my box. My box was given to me without my consent. I am not sure that I quite like it. The story of one is not the story of all others.

The Presumptious Flock

Who are they? The are the present, the past and the future. Maybe not the future, I am hoping that will change. The are the collective that repeats the memory of the way things were...or never were. Taking the past and assuming it to be the present. Confusing new faces with old history. A history, for some, that never existed, for it was not theirs to begin with.

Little Alice

Little Alice
Who is she? Can her stories be told through images? Can one read the repetition, the spinning, the movement, the inward and outward pulling and pushing... The clarity, the smudgedness... The barely there but always in sight...

The Little Girl

I am playing around with my little girl. Cut outs, stencils, scratching, painting...

The Creole School

I bit the bullet. I finally stopped procrastinating, and did something. White creole identity, or lack there of. The misappropriation of roles. I began to illustrate the gap between identities and roles where, as I grew up, I found myself. The confusing contradictions.

As much of these inconsistencies became evident to me while I was in school, I realized that the school itself was a strong symbol for me. It seemed to be a place where roles were handed out and enforced by everyone there, oftentimes with the recipient having little or no say in the matter.








They are all actually quick sketches done in colour pencil and the last in gouache.
Details...details...I will quickly run through the relevance of certain visual elements to me.

The little girl (she doesn't have a name as yet) is I think either a memory or a persona of myself, I am not sure as yet.I wanted to illustrate certain inconsistencies in roles that really remained in my mind after all these years. Things that for the sole reason of the way that I looked, were seeming tasks I should/could not do by my beloved fellow Trinidadians(braiding one's own hair, sweeping the floor , owning a fancy new car and eating creole food correctly).

So this character should appear with her hair braided all by her self and not by a maid. And she will also carry her broom which she has used many times before. She gets dropped to school in her mom's old Sunny. And she also likes to eat doubles, whether is its correctly or incorrectly, she bringing it.

It was a very natural thing to depict my character as a child and in her uniform. Then I realized the possibility of using the school as a symbol. These roles and the inconsistencies are enforced and reinforced at school, on the way to school and on the way home from school.

Who is doing all this enforcing and reinforcing? Classmates, teachers, one's parents, other parents, people you meet on the way and any random person who feels the need to shout it across the street, which is quite common.

But the symbolic nature of the school needn't always be implicitly there as in the last drawing. It is implied in the way she is dressed and in her hairstyle.

So there I am, I have made progress. The most progress I have made in a long time. And I feel really good about it.

A short story of Alice

Her name is Alice. But she also goes by whitee, whites, pinky, reds, fine lips, pink nipples, ey look a white gyal, sexy reds, how long yuh staying in Trinidad. Empress, honkie, convant girl, you never sweep ah floor or plait ah hair. Ooooo dey ooooo dey oooh oh oh, cyah cyah cyah cyah. She was always too skinny, too white, too rich, too poor to be one of them. They spoke in accents to her and at her. It was always a joke. Oh goush, look at white people in ah old car! Cyah, cyah, cyah. Never comfortable in her home, in her school, in her skin, she somehow managed to hide the hurt. Pretend it was ok, that she was ok. A self conscious, shy, uncomfortable girl... All ah we is one, cyah, cyah, cyah...

This native has a narrative, and it's coming out.

De Whitie Talks

I am currently working on a new and exciting project tentatively titled 'De Whitie Talks'. While reading I came across this interesting essay by Annie Pual, 'The Enigma of Survival: traveling beyond the expat gaze'. This particular excerpt stood out for me. NB, all phrases highlighted were done so by myself and not Annie Paul.

"Cozier's South African experience suggests that there is much to be gained from swiveling the steadfastly northward gaze of the expat art critic/historian in a southerly direction. The danger inscribed in the expat gaze is that one might end up being co-opted into nation narratives and thus miss the alterNATIVES such as Cozier, Ouditt, Bowen, Irenee Shaw, and others. Cozier talks of feeling "storyless" and "myth-less." The alterNATIVES are natives without narratives, or perhaps ones with unpopular or inconvenient narratives. Often their talent is recognized abroad before it is accepted as talent at home. In privileging a discourse about the self and the other exclusively, the expat gaze overlooks identities ostracized or exiled by the national. In between representations of the self and the other are lost a myriad of OUR SELVES who fall into the chasm between Us and Them. These are the untranslatables, the alterNATIVEs, those who resist translation into the language of the nation."

I think that I am one of the alterNATIVEs that Paul speaks of. The story of my nation does not include me. Where do I fit in, I often wonder? Are my narratives unpopular or inconvenient? I think so. How then do make my narrative part of the national narrative? Do I need to? Do I really want to? Does anyone else want to know or even care? Often times, I think not. Are we really all at Home in the Land of the Homeless? Some may be, but I feel that many, myself included, have a deep sense of non-belonging, an unwelcome-ness emanating from this space.

So then what of De Whitie Talks? What does the whitie have to say? Stay tuned...