Indigo Plantation series (2020)

While  looking for meaning / significance of the colour indigo, I found out that Tobago (the sister isle of Trinidad) was actually one of the countries where the Indigo plant (Indigo suffruticosa) was produced, cultivated by enslaved peoples, stolen from Africa. 

According to the article: The Rich blue history of Indigo (Newsday, July 2019), the Indigo plant was cultivated around Tobago, as the island was colonized by the British, French then Courlanders from the 1500s…Indigo was then exported as a dye, a raw material – for Europe. While the production of indigo in the tropical “colonies” (islands such as Jamaica, Tobago) and South Carolina USA was short lived, nonetheless it remains an important part of our Caribbean History.

For this series, I gave myself the freedom to create the stories, moments, thoughts that inevitably occur within a human lifetime and which significantly leave an impact…all of these details of the colonial era which remain undocumented, or which have simply been erased with language and documentation which systematically relay a very linear, objectified and unidemensional story of the African experience during the tragedy of slavery, Western colonisation and imperial conquest. 

There is a necessity for me to recreate these details visually as a way to honour the singular human, lived experiences of those generations who have been here before us.  

Acrylic on watercolour paper.