Camp Street Corner2023-03-20T02:47:45+00:00

Camp Street Corner

The title Camp Street Corner comes from Bill Rogers’ 1930s calypso West Indian Weed Woman that features the patois street cry of a herb seller whose dozens of plant names are obscure to us now. My mother was Trinidadian, but apart from time there as a child my primary contact with the Caribbean has been as an artist researcher. Over the last ten years I have reevaluated this background through research visits to Trinidad, St. Kitts Nevis, and Jamaica, speaking at conferences on Caribbean sound, music, and poetry, and making artwork about these challenging colonial and post-colonial histories.
Eight of these watercolors depict photographs from 2018-2019 visits to Jamaica. Those photographs are of museum displays concerning medicinal, herbal, and military uses of plants. Four watercolors show Accompong Maroon villagers celebrating their ancestors’ use of plant camouflage in defeating the British enslavers. Another shows a photograph of a food counter in a Rasta Ital restaurant viewed on a laptop computer. The Rasta restaurant prepares natural food traditionally as an attentive ritual, surrounded by images of Haile Selassie and Bob Marley. Photographic framing and focusing errors, and color irregularities in the printing, are reproduced in the watercolors. These works are completed by frames made from fallen branches. All of these are painted on Yupo or on watercolor paper. Visiting Accompong Maroon village museum in western Jamaica, I was struck by the warm idiosyncrasy of the installations where new photographs were pinned over old, posters splashed with redecorating paint, and plants hung in front of printed images. In part, I incorporate these features as distancing methods. Reproducing my errors in photographing and printing, showing a photo on a laptop, including blurry images and awkward trompe l’oeil, and framing the watercolors with fallen branches, serve as reminders of my complicated status as a visitor to these communities and consumer of such images.
One of the remaining three watercolors depicts the 30+ plants transported from Africa to the Americas during the 350 years of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The last four are of photographs taken of the “Diaspora” entry in the book “New Keywords” explained there as “the scattering of the seeds,” joining the history of enslavement to legacies of plant use. This series of works on the African plant diaspora develop from research into the historical uses of plants by indigenous and formerly enslaved Caribbean peoples whose horticultural knowledge maintained culinary and medical traditions that originated in Africa and on the islands. This understanding of the ecological value of crop diversity did not interest colonizers committed to soil-depleting monocultures like sugar whose profits drove the slave trade. These watercolors of dried herbs on the National Museum Jamaica walls pay homage to vanishing knowledge as the Caribbean is overwhelmed by imported food.
The two sculptures made from stenciled cardboard boxes are of the diasporic trees, ackee and plantain, whose fruit is central to Jamaican national cooking.