Claudia Cheng, independent art advisor and curator, reviews recent work by Barbados-born artist Annalee Davis. Read full interview at Claudia Cheng.
Annalee Davis (b. 1963, Barbados) has a multi-faceted practice as a visual artist, cultural instigator, educator, and writer. Her practice focuses on post-plantation economies by engaging with the history and landscape of Barbados. Her studio is situated on a working dairy farm historically operational as a 17th-century sugarcane plantation, providing a critical context for her work. Drawing inspiration from activities such as drawing, walking, making (bush) teas, and cultivating living apothecaries, Annalee’s practice explores future reclamation, growth, and restoration strategies for previously colonised landscapes. Weaving together a reverence for healing plants and traditional knowledge maintained by women closely connected to their local botanical environments, Davis’ practice reveals the significance of botanicals and living plots as ancestral communal, learning, and healing sites.
Annalee received a BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art (1986) and an MFA from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (1989). She is currently presenting a solo exhibition – In the Sugar Gardens at the Airas Wang de Lafée, Girona, Spain, and participating in a group exhibition Spirit in the Land at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in Florida. Her 2023 work commissioned by the National Trust for Scotland, A Hymn to the Banished, was recently exhibited in Silent Archive, Inverleith House, RBGE, Edinburgh, Scotland, in Against Apartheid, KARST, Plymouth, UK, and in Seeds and Souls at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. A series of six large works on paper, Second Spring, were exhibited in Linhas Tortas at Mendes Wood in São Paulo, Brazil. Pray to Flowers – A Plot of Disalientation was produced for the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present.
What brought you into the art world? Do you have any memories from your childhood that drove you to become an artist?
It was never a choice to be in the art world. Being an artist is all I have ever imagined I could do or be. I did not fully understand what it would mean to be a visual artist–but it was clear from about age thirteen or fourteen that this was my vocation.
My paternal grandmother made paintings and my mother played the piano, embroidered, and occasionally painted murals in my older siblings’ bedrooms. My four siblings each played musical instruments so there was space for creative expression in our home. A family friend from Haiti based in Dominica, Gilda Thébaud Nassief, was the only full-time practicing artist who came to our home presenting a different possibility to me as a young girl.
How has growing up in Barbados shaped you as an artist?
The broader history of Barbados as Britain’s first sugar isle, the impact of it being shaped as a plantation laboratory and receiving a colonial education have shaped my life and work in many ways. Being raised on sugar plantations, and walking in former sugar cane fields as a regular ritual serves many purposes. This includes reducing my alienation from the living world and the particular landscape I’ve lived on for twenty-three years which has been mediated by the plantation for centuries. Walking challenges my thinking mind to expand my feeling-heart and experience the fullness of this terra firma beyond forced monoculture practices, human traumas, global marketplaces, and more recent extractive tourist economies.
Can you describe your creative process?
My work often begins with words: words that I read, words exchanged in conversations with others to help me unpack ideas, and words that I write. Writing and reading against the grain of history is one way to locate the fissures, open them up, and allow other storylines to manifest, creating portals into our shared pasts where we may better understand our nuanced history. My art practice is an ongoing process of unraveling my schooling and through it, unlearning the plantation that sits within me.
The studio is where conversations about complex historical moments happen, where I confront history’s chaotic past, which does not lie in some former time–the past echoes and infects the present. Drawing, embroidering, and growing small gardens allow me to function as a disparate cartographer contemplating entangled terrains in multiple ways. Tracing lines on paper, pressing leaves, and pulling threads acknowledge contradictory feelings about these grounds beneath my feet laden with historical violence and segregation. My consciousness was initially informed by innocent childhood experiences and a growing love for its beauty, allowing for conflicting understandings of what took place on this small island. [. . .]
Can you tell us about the new body of work that you have created for your current solo exhibition at Airas Wang de Lafée Gallery in Girona?
Airas Wang de Lafée has been a gracious and hospitable gallery to work with over the past year. In the Sugar Garden incorporates three new pieces including a wall-mounted herbarium. It opens with two small studies of parasites on ledger pages establishing a context for the show.
In Sugar Cone – A Motherplot, the Girona-based collection of potted plants builds a bridge to this less familiar geographical context, harking back to those who have fostered traditional relationships with the more-than-human world.
In discussions with Sira Pizà, curator of In the Sugar Gardens, I learned from her about a community in the High Pyrenees called the Trementinaires. This group of women lived in secluded valleys in the mountains of northern Spain in the early 19th century and were named after their most sought-after product, trementina or turpentine. The Trementinaires fashioned their annual cycle of harvesting, manufacturing, and traveling as healers with collections of medicinal herbs foraged from the valley which they transported in skirt pockets or packed in small tin boxes. Traveling in groups of two, these women traversed the mountainous trading routes in fall and winter, bringing well-being to isolated communities without access to formal medicine and relying on traditional knowledge systems held by women in close relationship with their local botanical environments.
Sugar Cone – A Motherplot highlights revolutionary and subversive botanical histories, acknowledging them as agents of restoration and reparation while insisting on the need for us to remember valuable systems of knowledge often erased or forgotten, whether in the Caribbean archipelago or the High Pyrenees. Eleven potted plants, nine typical of the Catalan region, and two from Barbados, have been fostered by Catalan-based Andrew Birk who has carefully sown seeds to cultivate this small-scale nursery. Understanding the plantation as the colonial project that erased our relationship with the motherland, for me, the act of growing a garden or small plot is a way to disalienate and reconnect with the soil offering a way to care for generational trauma, and to mother a motherless land. [. . .]
Read full interview at https://www.claudia-cheng.com/editorial/annalee-davis-reverence-for-healing-plants-and-restoring-post-colonised-landscapes
[Shown above: 1) Photo of Annalee Davis by Josep Plaja. 2) Sugar Cone – A Motherplot, made in collaboration with Eloi Mora, 2024. Photo credit: Joan Divi for Airas Wang de Lafée Gallery.]
Claudia Cheng, independent art advisor and curator, reviews recent work by Barbados-born artist Annalee Davis. Read full interview at Claudia Cheng. Annalee Davis (b. 1963, Barbados) has a multi-faceted practice as a visual artist, cultural instigator, educator, and writer. Her practice focuses on post-plantation economies by engaging with the history and landscape of Barbados. Her
