Open Studio by Khaffi Beckles, Bianca Peake and Elechi Todd.
Granderson Lab, Trinidad & Tobago
“Process” was the focus of this open studio and “incubator” idea, brought to Granderson Lab, Belmont (Trinidad & Tobago) by Trinbagonian contemporary artists Khaffi Beckles, Bianca Peake and Elechi Todd earlier this year. What happens when process becomes the focus? Couldn’t the studio become a collective research experience?
It is with these prompts in mind, that I made it to the OPEN STUDIO by Beckles, Peake & Todd, set up at Granderson Lab (a project by Alice Yard). For those of you who know, Granderson Lab is a working and experimental space containing micro spaces, all evolving and impacting each other simultaneously. I’ve known Granderson Lab for the past 10 years or so, and it has always been a place where you just know creative work has been produced, “The Artist wuz here” is an understatement.
From Moko Jumbie groups, Mas making, artist residencies…and most recently Burrokeet classes, when you decide to speak to Sean Leonard, Nicholas Laughlin and Christopher Cozier (Founders of Alice Yard and Granderson Lab) about creating – it is understood that you are speaking of co-creation, collaborative work and community – due to the very nature of this space which bears the marks of action, intervention, activation. It is also understood that you accept to be a part of a living and breathing space, to be influenced and affected by multiple (f)actors – visible and invisible – constantly informing your art practice, and above all transforming your process.
Observation Table. Postcards hanging on a line. Dry palm frond.
In speaking with Khaffi Beckles and Bianca Peake, both told me how amazing it was to actually see your friends/ fellow artist peers do the work. And while we do “know” each other’s work – as in we could recognize brush stroke, palette, subject matter – we really have never seen each other in the act of creating. I mean, who is the Artist who also happens to be my friend? What are they feeling, observing, analyzing and articulating?
Bianca tells me that “4 weeks is not as long as you might think” because as we know, time just flies, but how she just enjoyed watching Elechi and Khaffi paint. Khaffi recalls Elechi at the beginning of the incubator period saying “Y’all I’m going for a walk” camera in hand, then seeing the proof of what was captured later on: a series of stunning night photography of Belmont’s traditional wrought iron gates and fences… (November – December 2022). The artists reflect on this incubator experience as one that was supportive, encouraging them to truly zone in focus on their practice.
Apply the paint. Do the research. Bad mood, Best day. Start with a sketch. Vulnerability. Thread the needle. Start again.
Inspired by palms, coconut trees, Trinidadian and Irish mythologies, all coexisting with feminine and familiar animal forms – Bianca Peake’s display of monoprints, cyanotype works and smaller paintings on canvas and handwritten notes explore womanhood, “perceptions of the body and the context it sits in” as well as the limitations of that physical body. ” The pieces move me to reflect on the feminine quality as supernatural, magical and mystical – and this throughout world and Caribbean (Hi)story. A creature with the capacity to transform, morph and transcend the mundane.
Khaffi Beckles presented an installation which I believe she created as two works, for me however they read as one. To the left, a delicate display of rectangular brown-cotton textile pieces, each containing a hand-embroidered message. Beckles remembers a similar set up in her grandmother’s bedroom, where she remembers seeing greeting cards hung together, side by side, all messages of affection to her grandmother. This time however, Beckles’ cards are sending messages, they read as revelations of a daughter to her mother, her grandmother about the unpronounceable… “These pieces are about saying hard things through soft materials…I’m also thinking about intergenerational trauma.”
Alongside the installation, a collage work of a contemplative female figure, seated almost entangled in vines of crimson ixora flowers, large blooming tropical orchids. This is personal work. We speak about the “tension between sexuality and innocence” as a young woman, the constant “complexity, the tugging, a push and pull” as she describes it where intimate relationships are concerned.
“BREADFRUIT TREES TALL TOO” What would seem obvious from observation, the fact that the artist felt the need to write this phrase (and treat it as a title, even textually framing the piece as a whole) jumped out as an affirmation, an assertion of Caribbeanness for me. Elechi Todd’s totemic painting, assembled on smaller pieces of paper, seemed to be a conversation about the desire to reaffirm Caribbean/ BIPOC/ Global South identities, explored through the lens of “Tropical Aesthetics” (according to Samantha A. Noel in her book “Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism). Samantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other white-dominant regimes through tropicalist representation.
While I did not have the opportunity to meet Todd over the weekend, the scale and striking colour palette felt like a deliberate choice to reclaim space as Caribbean people, Tropical people, Global South people. People who know what a Breadfruit tree is, Artocarpus, or L’artocarpe in Guadeloupe or Martinique…and its importance, its stories, its role in indigenous medicine. I also appreciated the structure of the work: mimicking what I saw as the breadfruit’s skin itself: a mosaic of endless mini cubic shapes, one on top another, together, to make one whole…
There is a spontaneity which arises when Art is created beyond the many constraints we’ve set up for it (time is just one of them) and without the expectation or obligation of financial gain/ agenda. Bianca, Khaffi and I also discuss the pressure that is placed on Artists (often by non-artists and commercially-driven Art galleries) to keep making, churning out paintings as though Artists were robots, randomly spraying paint from their cans…And it is true, perhaps we don’t speak or rant about it enough. The works and/or works in progress shared by Beckles, Peake and Todd were truly refreshing and I am glad I made the time to stop by.
In the end, our art makers and creative workers here in Trinidad & Tobago (and the wider Caribbean) need time and space to think, to experiment, to produce work that aligns with their vision, their goals, their artistic inquiry as contemporary artists. Read that again. Art with any aspiration to engage on multiple levels, takes time. Respect the process. I don’t know of any other art space or gallery in Trinidad & Tobago besides Alice Yard (via Granderson Lab) which offers a consistent Artist residency programme here in Trinidad & Tobago. As an art professional-artist-curator I’d like to understand why or precisely why not? And more importantly – how could we start creating the Residencies, and the opportunities that our artists need ?
Opportunities like this incubator/ Open Studio and Residencies (Artistic and Curatorial) allow so much more room for learning, experimentation, revisiting the familiar, leaning into process, awaiting the unknown. That which is yet to be known or understood, could just become exceptional.
Photography by Patrick Rasoanaivo