Trinity Buoys Wharf Drawing Prize 2023 selection.
In this series I draw on my Caribbean heritage (I am Trinidadian) and research to make totemic drawings of a Trinidad carnival character called the Moko Jumbie, which I then merge with other carnival characters, (in this case the blue devil and imp/douen characters) that are rooted in the Caribbean experience of enslavement, indentureship, and migration. “Moko” means healer in Central Africa and "jumbie", a colloquial Caribbean term for a ghost or spirit. In Carnival lore the jumbies are ‘spirits’ that followed the enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to their destinations in the Caribbean, walking on stilts – and in my imaginings – to the Antilles and wherever else they eventually resided, creating an African diaspora. There they watched over us, watched us birthed, watched us toil, watched us play, watched our pain, sorrow, and our joy, and helped with the process of healing. Today they are still watching. Today we are still healing.
In these drawings I explore various kinds of mark-making in what can often feel like a stream of consciousness meditation with the pencil, the paper, and my thoughts. I combine the written word, line art, sketching, doodling, comic illustration, cartoons, gestural mark making and erasing. My process sees me juxtaposing and deliberately appropriating archival researched images, Caribbean literature, dancehall, reggae and calypso music lyrics, poetry, personal essays, comic book characters, adinkra patterns, homages to Caribbean intellectuals, history, and marking contemporary current headline-making news, often as it happens.
With these drawings I create works that attempt to trace histories and connect the past to the present within the form of the Moko Jumble. In so doing, I am seeking to capture on paper a spirit that sees multiple realities at once. In them, just as my ancestors did, I cross the Atlantic and back again. These drawings are visual essays that the viewer can deconstruct and reassemble based on their own individual and shared experiences and remembrances.