Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Bridgemohan, Michaela
Master of Fine Arts - MFA
University of British Columbia
“Oleaginous duppy: alternate paths of connection through immaterial to material making” is a support paper that explores the multiplicity and multi-dimensionality embedded in Black diasporic identity through ontological Caribbean folk being, duppy, who was transmitted to me through my father. As an individual who belongs to two different groups—Jamaican and Australian—while occupying in Canada, I explore how duppy’s corporal nature becomes an inspiration to hybrid, liminal sensibilities. I weave personal anecdotes with Caribbean scholars Stuart Hall and Edouard Glissant’s literary works to unpack the ambivalent relations associated with duppy. This autoethnographic approach locates myself into these histories and connections that are necessary to reveal duppy as an embodiment, tethered to forbidden realms of “Other,” a non-essentialist and spiritually ‘taboo.’ Scholars Charmaine A. Nelson, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Kathrine McKittrick, Ralina L. Joseph, and Montré Aza Missouri and authors Dionne Brand, Erna Brodber, all contribute to this unpacking. Transitioning from immaterial legacies to material relations, I refer to culturally informed cooking and grooming practices as ways of making that induce cultural sustenance as emergent potentials to manifest duppy. I connect this process to scholar Christina Sharpe’s concept of ‘wake work’ as an evocative reflection of how cultural rituals sustain memories and connect us with our ancestors. By incorporating my personal experiences in cooking with my father and personal grooming, I employ these relational practices as methodical steps toward creative ritualistic making. By recognizing that consideration for the Land and beings is deeply ingrained in Jamaican customs, the artistic production with Indigo and wood is discussed as more than material mediums, but as material beings, who I collaborate with. To imbue wood with Indigo transfigures their surface as more than a singular entity. The thesis exhibition and the support paper are what I see as an heirloom of these discourses and concepts.
Oleaginous duppy: alternate paths of connection through immaterial to material making by Michaela Bridgemohan B.F.A., Alberta University of the Arts, 2017 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Visual Arts) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) August 2022 © Michaela Bridgemohan, 2022 iii Abstract “Oleaginous duppy: alternate paths of connection through immaterial to material making” is a support paper that explores the multiplicity and multi-dimensionality embedded in Black diasporic identity through ontological Caribbean folk being, duppy, who was transmitted to me through my father. As an individual who belongs to two different groups—Jamaican and Australian—while occupying in Canada, I explore how duppy’s corporal nature becomes an inspiration to hybrid, liminal sensibilities. I weave personal anecdotes with Caribbean scholars Stuart Hall and Edouard Glissant’s literary works to unpack the ambivalent relations associated with duppy. This autoethnographic approach locates myself into these histories and connections that are necessary to reveal duppy as an embodiment, tethered to forbidden realms of “Other,” a non-essentialist and spiritually ‘taboo.’ Scholars Charmaine A. Nelson, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Kathrine McKittrick, Ralina L. Joseph, and Montré Aza Missouri and authors Dionne Brand, Erna Brodber, all contribute to this unpacking. Transitioning from immaterial legacies to material relations, I refer to culturally informed cooking and grooming practices as ways of making that induce cultural sustenance as emergent potentials to manifest duppy. I connect this process to scholar Christina Sharpe’s concept of ‘wake work’ as an evocative reflection of how cultural rituals sustain memories and connect us with our ancestors. By incorporating my personal experiences in cooking with my father and personal grooming, I employ these relational practices as methodical steps toward creative ritualistic making. By recognizing that consideration for the Land and beings is deeply ingrained in Jamaican customs, the artistic production with Indigo and wood is discussed as more than material mediums, but as material beings, who I collaborate with. To imbue wood with Indigo transfigures their surface as more than a singular entity. The thesis exhibition and the support paper are what I see as an heirloom of these discourses and concepts. iv Lay Summary “Oleaginous duppy: alternate paths of connection through immaterial to material making” is a support paper that addresses Caribbean folk figure, duppy as a cultural artifact that carries historical knowledge to the Afro-diasporic and colonial experience. By including personal anecdotes as a descendant of Jamaican and Australian parents and an individual born and raised in Canada, I’ve discovered that concepts of safety and care are found in good cooking and patient grooming practices. My desire to acknowledge my family and community is considered in how I engage with the natural dye Indigo and black walnut and wenge wood. I hope to achieve a fundamental artistic praxis through this creative process where my artwork contributes to the interpolated Black voices in Canadian contemporary art and history. v Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... v List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... viii Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... xi Chapter 1: Living in the “afterlife” ..............................................................................................1 1.1 (I)dentifiable apparitions ............................................................................................... 31.2 duppy ............................................................................................................................. 6 1.3 Relational Composites ................................................................................................ 11 1.4 Body as a form of taboo .............................................................................................. 16 1.4.1 Taboo as emergent magic ..................................................................................... 21 Chapter 2: wake work as Research-Creation ............................................................................27 2.1 Grooming duppy ......................................................................................................... 32 2.2 Materializing duppy .................................................................................................... 39 Chapter 3: Effigies .......................................................................................................................48 3.1 Effigies: thicc pick .......................................................................................................... 48 3.2 Effigies: duppy-catcher ................................................................................................... 55 Chapter 4: Closing remarks ........................................................................................................67 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................72 vi List of Figures Figure 1.4.1.1: duppy pelt……………………..…….……………………….…………………..21 Figure 1.4.1.2: duppy pelt………………………………….…………………………………….24 Figure 2.1: Dad washing goat….……………………………….………………………………..30 Figure 2.1.1: the arm of a prickly rose brush (Rosa acicularis)….……….………………....…..34 Figure 2.1.2: fingers caught in knotty hair………………….…………..……………………......36 Figure 2.1.3: supporting thicc pick while practicing performance…..…………………………..37 Figure 2.2.1: Indigo flower…………………………..…………………………………………..39 Figure 2.2.2: tye-dyed cloth (adire oniko) with full moon (osu bamba), Unknown Artists...…...41 Figure 2.2.3: curry goat process……………………………………………………….………....42 Figure 2.2.4: reducing agent process……………………………………………………………..43 Figure 2.2.5: dissolved Indigo…………………………………………………………………....44 Figure 2.2.6: a glimpse of myself showing the tools when working with the pot……………......45 Figure 2.2.7: a forgotten hair net that was found at the bottom of my vat…………………….....46 Figure 2.2.8: three dips of Indigo on cotton twine……………………………………………….47 Figure 3.1.1: thicc pick…………………………………………………………………………….48 Figure 3.1.2: thicc pick (detail shot)…………………………………………………………......51 Figure 3.1.3: thicc pick (detail shot of tines)…………………………………………………….53 Figure 3.1.4: practice of combing the Land with thicc pick…………………………………......54 Figure 3.2.1: duppy-catcher b.2021-2022.……………………………………………………….55 Figure 3.2.2: stringy hair bitch (detail of net)………………………………………………........56 Figure 3.2.3: stringy hair bitch……………………………………………………………….......57Figure 3.2.4: stringy hair bitch (installation)…………………………………………………….58 Figure 3.2.5: a serious message of boundaries……………...……..……………………...……..59 Figure 3.2.6: a serious message of boundaries………...………………………………………...60 viiFigure 3.2.7: a serious message of boundaries (bottle cap detailed) …………………….……...61 Figure 3.2.8: a serious message of boundaries (staple detail) ……………………………...…...62 Figure 3.2.9: Installation shot………………………………………………………………........63 viiiAcknowledgements The creative research and artworks produced here could not have materialized without the expertise, generous support, and patience of my supervisor Tania Willard. Thank you, Tania, for always encouraging me to find my voice through material making and seeking relational bonds with people, beings, non-beings, and the Land. I am also sincerely blessed to have a powerhouse of a committee, Renay Egami and Samuel Roy-Bois. Thank you both for your enthusiasm and wisdom. The scope of this work wouldn’t exist without your insights and critiques. Also, thank you, Nancy Holmes, for your guidance and support. I also extend special thanks to Christine Howard, Dr. Bonaventure Ndikung, Vanessa Brown, and Cheryl L’Hirondelle for sharing their knowledges and experience. I also want to thank Philip Wyness, Kaila Kalinocka, and Michael Doerksen for always being receptive to my—sometimes odd—sculptural ideas. A special thank you to Philip, who guided me throughout the year, challenged me and allowed me to shadow him during the making process. I am very thankful for your keen eye and humour. Thank you, FCCS, for graciously awarding me the Graduate Dean’s Thesis Fellowship and Graduate Student Research Award, which ultimately influenced the production of this creative research. A special thank you to all the people I love and more: Andrea Routley, whose love and generous support met with no end and was only stoked by the creative intensity we share. Thank you for being my friend who is always open and supportive of whatever creative idea or project I come up with and making it a reality. Also, a special thank you to Natasha, Maura, Scott, Brittany, Xiao Xuan, and Eva for the friendship, wisdom, company, love, and generosity. Thank you to long-time friend Hannah McIntyre for our shared nights decoding Gilroy’s text, practicing presentations, and experiencing life together. Another special thank you to Lauren Brown—who always pushed me to go above and beyond and to never give up on art and justice. Without you, my soul sister, I wouldn’t be here—lastly, tender gratitude to Tim for holding space for authenticity, creativity, love, and empathy. I want to extend my most profound appreciation and love to my parents and extend family. Mum, Dad, my stepparents Bryan and Doris. Thank you, Dad, for understanding my nature and supporting my pursuit in this artistic study as to reconnect with Grandma and family. Thank you to my siblings: Tina, our family historian, who’s been by my side throughout this experience and inspired me to seek and speak truths. Rebecca, for accompanying me throughout this journey and Daniel for matching my energy. I must acknowledge and thank the artists, scholars, and activists cited in this paper who’ve paved the way for emerging artists like myself to challenge and create through intersectional, relational, and decolonial praxis. I give thanks to the sistren who share the Caribbean diaspora space with me. This paper is for you. A thank you to the Land for holding my family, loved ones, and dearly departed. A special thank you to the Syilx (Okanagan) People and their ancestors for caretaking these lands for a time immemorable. ixDedication To grandma (Daphne) coco catla uncle Sandy 1 Chapter 1: Living in the “afterlife” This paper reflects on my obsession with the ever-present and reappearing bodies who emanate from the “afterlife” and who can be evoked by the glance of my skin, incantations of memories, and cultural practices. These figures of the afterlife are collectively the duppy, a Caribbean ontological figure whose bodily essence mimics the very fabric of diasporic experience. These duppies re-emerge from the past into the present with a residual carnal touch, leaving a relational mark of memory for future generations. Their liminal presence is observed, explored, and manifested throughout my interdisciplinary artistic research and methodological practice to contextualize how I navigate “Canadian” life as a Black mixed-race woman of Jamaican and Australian decent. Thinking about relational bonds, the body, and Land, I consider how history both impedes and expands on how my artwork can be interpreted. I am driven to reinscribe new notions of multiplicity and multi-dimensionality within Black identity in a Canadian context, as a way to express how embracing my dual cultures can introduce other ways of living life and creative expression. To lurk in-between the veils of the afterlife, one must anticipate the encounter of suppressed voices. My studio-based practice, defense paper, and the MFA Thesis exhibition document these interactions. It is imperative to acknowledge that this artistic research was conducted on the unceded territories of the Syilx (Okanagan) People and took place amidst the COVID pandemic, clutched by many large-scale wildfires within the surrounding areas, and amid discoveries of the undocumented graves of Indigenous children on Residential-School grounds across Canada while Indigenous Land and Water protectors and Anti-racist activists fight for sovereignty, equity, and equality. I departed Mohkinstsis (also known as Calgary, Alberta) at a time when 2 Black Lives Matter (BLM) marches surged, and I witnessed the lives of my friends become much more tumultuous especially as tension escalated between them and artist-run galleries. I felt uneasy choosing to focus on graduate studies and on my artistic practice when I could have been with my community and loved ones. Though lachrymose, these events and my disposition will have a way to emerge within my art process and hopefully speak to these current social and environmental changes. Through an autoethnographic prose and intersectional Feminist stance, I will share personal figures, cultural ways of living, and intimate modes of making to unpack my research-creation art practice. In this way, the language choices and personal reflections seek to prioritize the personal over academic conventions. It is important to identify that this artistic field of research has a history of ethnographic probing that often removes or objectifies individuals and cultural practices. This also extends to research fields that remove and objectify the Land and other non/beings within it. Within the scope of my work, Land is approached as alive, knowledgeable, all-encompassing—they are the city, nature, wasteland, all the above and more. Due to Indigenous Land claims in the America’s, the connection to ownership of Land is tied to colonialism and for this reason I think of Land not as mine to own or possess. I approach Land with a capital “L,” for they are fiercely independent and familiar. Within these relations, I will begin by introducing myself, sharing bits of my history that significantly shaped my perspective, relationship to the Land and other interests today. In Chapter 1, I will present duppy—a Jamaican folk figure—and how their history influenced how I navigate myself as an artistic practitioner. Chapter 2 follows these developed understandings by incorporating relational rituals that foster 3 self-sustenance and creative power. Chapter 3 expands on the artworks created during this candidacy, and Chapter 4 offers closing remarks. From the wise words of Stuart Hall, “If the paper seems preoccupied with the diaspora experience and its narratives of displacement, it is worth remembering that all discourse is “placed”, and the heart has its reasons” (223). 1.1 (I)dentifiable apparitions In a space before time and words, the world was covered in a thick blanket of darkness. It was a warm and loving covering. Since it was hard for the spirits who inhabited this space to see one another they learned to live by and through touch. So, if you were running around lost you knew you were found when arms reached out in that loving darkness to hold you. And those arms that held the spirits in that beautiful dark space before time are holding us still. (hooks, Sisters of the Yam 59) bell hooks wrote a passage about dreaming in darkness and the people who birth from its powerful magic. I can confidently say that I am not afraid of the dark. Where people see fear and uncertainty, I see colour and familiarity because I have always been cradled by loving brown arms. This is my superpower. “We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific” (Hall 222). I’ll introduce myself, Michaela—here on Syilx territory—was born and raised in Mohkinstsis in the early 90s into families of opposing cultures and social statuses. My father born and raised in Jamaica, who immigrated later in his adult life, to Montreal, Canada. My mother, a settler Australian woman, who came to Canada in the middle of her childhood with her family. Knowing and practicing Australian and Jamaican cultures is very important in my family but came with various frequencies. 4 I would describe these frequencies as unbalanced since one would dominate the other. I assume this unequal balance was unconsciously read since classmates would speak about my siblings’ and me as “different” from everyone else in elementary school. This was before I knew what “Black” was. I brought these concerns to my father, and I was surprised when he told me Black people do not originate from Canada nor Jamaica, that the original inhabitants of Jamaica were the Arawak People.1 I identify this moment as a rupture in my conception of my place in the world. Such a rupture also occurred when maternal grandfather, Maxi, showed me paintings of Australian Aboriginal people (the sort of John William Lindt and terra nullius2 perspective) with accompanying words of encouragement—that reminded me that I am a “brown” woman—which, —left me with great ambivalence towards my own family. Lauren Fournier reminds us that when artists engage with their personal history, as “autotheory,” it locates philosophy, theory, and feminist frameworks, as key components asserting that “the personal [is] political” throughout the artistic process (3). Thinking about the personal, the political, and art making, the personal includes my childhood and moments where peers and teachers discredited my existence by stating that I am neither Australian nor Canadian. “Blackness” was nothing, which meant I was a nobody. As a child, I was deeply confused by this because I do have a body, and I exist. However, because of 1 Throughout the West Indies, the islands were occupied by various Indigenous groups and cultures mainly of Arawak and Taino people. 2 Audra Simpson reference how terra nullius (Latin for ‘empty land’) is applied in anthropological studies in her essay On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship. She references Captain Cook’s initial comments about the Aboriginal People in Australia as “…had no form of land tenure because they were uncivilsed, which meant the land belonged to no-one and was available for possession under the doctrine terra nullius” (69). Historically, you see how terra nullius is applied throughout watercolour and painting portraiture created by first settler artists who depicted the Aboriginal People as mythic and ‘animalized’. 5 my racial and ethnic ambiguity, did this mean that I am a ghost? These memories have motivated me to question: why must marginalized folks give up a part of ourselves in order to feel some sort of acceptance and safety in Canadian society? Why are these histories of dispossession and harm are not spoken about? During my BFA undergraduate career, I was introduced to Trezise and Wake’s concept of the “unspeakable” (180). I began to understand why conversations about colonialism, genocide, and cultural erasure stays within this “unspeakable” dimension. Because this history is a history of trauma, folks who do not relate to it, do not want to hear it (Trezise and Wake 180). If they do, they begin to appropriate this trauma as their own, Trezise and Wake names this phenomenon as “empty empathy,” and describes how this silences others who are directly impacted by the trauma (Trezise and Wake 195). In my thesis, I assert that it is through the power of art that the unspeakable can be transformed through felt interactions. It is with caution though, so that those who are not directly related to these traumatic colonial histories do not claim this trauma as their own, often done as a way to deal with the sorrow that follows from learning colonial realities. I invite those who are reading to consider these notions as welcoming but also with open and empathetic understanding. That this artist and author had to do a lot of adult learning at a very early age. Who also had to acknowledge that my relationship with Blackness, poverty, and erasure is located inside of Alberta from the 1990s to early 2000s and included microaggressions and discrimination throughout a spectrum. I also want to recognize that I have other privileges, such as those afforded through acceptance into a post-graduate program, colourism/white passing 6 privilege, and am abled-bodied, among others. That is why I identify as a Black mixed-race woman. To include myself with my mother and father; my siblings who mean the world to me; and my family members who are deceased and who visit me as apparitions—duppies. The story of duppy cannot be explained through one perspective or one anecdote. To speak about duppy, you must include all associated relations. The artists, authors and scholarly works referenced in this support paper all intersect with each other, which for me, feels familial. From this approach, I envision my history and artistic research as contributing to a legacy of knowledge and experience within the interpolated Black voices across the diaspora. This is an heirloom. 1.2 duppy Michaela. When you go searching for ghosts, they will find you. —Father I should start this chapter by acknowledging that a discussion of duppy is a difficult conversation. One must tread lightly. To utter their being brings a room to silence and the subject is often dismissed to avoid conjuring this enigmatic figure through thought. When we share a space with those unfamiliar to duppy, curiosity can thus unintentionally interrupt cultural and personal boundaries. I speak to this ethnographic probing as someone who has unintentionally done this and witnessed this unfold many times. As said by Jake Wumkes, “…given the fact that the traditions examined [here] are largely ritual-based, orally transmitted [in this case, through my father and on to me] [is] often shrouded in a secrecy [as a] response to hundreds of years of 7 persecution…” (14). Because of this persecution—specifically through The Obeah Law, duppy is not customarily discussed. The Obeah Law (1898) is an amendment in Jamaica that remains in force today. This law condemns those who are “in possession of ‘instruments of obeah’…” or “possessed of any occult or ‘supernatural power’…” (Jamaica). To secure convictions, Myalism is looped in with The Obeah Act as well: “Obeah” shall be deemed to be one and the same meanings as “Myalism;” (Jamaica). According to Pin-Chia Feng, Obeah is largely interpreted by the contemporary Afro-Caribbean community as an antisocial, self-serving sorcery practitioner who “fraternize[’s] malevolent spirits” such as duppy (153). In contrast, Myal is deeply rooted in a “community-based ceremony” (Bibly and Handler 156). Both Obeah and Myal work with the dead, spirits, divination, and medicinal remedies, which were utilized to empower Black folks who were forcibly enslaved (Feng 154-155). Considering these relations, I, myself, have limits and boundaries to working with duppy. I am curious about duppy’s ambiguity—in both myth, written history and memory—which shrouds cultural knowledge. This “shrouding” reminds me (and hopefully others) of the integrity of this subject matter and acknowledges that this conversation is still an act of taboo (in my culture) and should be considered delicately. 130. DOPI ‘the spirit of the dead, believed to be capable of returning to aid or (more often) harm living beings, directly or indirectly; they are also believed subject to the power of OBEAH and its practitioners who can ‘set’ or ‘put’ a duppy upon a victim and ‘take off’ their influence. (Farquharson 259). 8 I will continue referring to duppy3 in italics to remind readers of its African etymology (xxxiii Beckwith). I have chosen to use lowercase for duppy to evoke the same sort of presence that Gloria Jean Watkins did with her pen name, bell hooks. This allows readers and the author to think about lineage and presence, both as connected to yet removed from the self, the I, which is always capitalized. By lowering the upper-case letter ‘d’, allows moments of mental slippage in-between language and conversation because it denotes the past, present, and future, which the act of recollection can speak through volumes of presence in subtle or unexpecting ways—similar to the mannerisms of how ghosts decide to conceal or reveal themselves to people. Reflecting on personal and community reactions to duppy, both my own and those of others inside and outside my community, I am daunted by the anticipation of the revival and “re-visitation” to the “unspeakable.” I have previously mentioned how Trezie and Wake notes the unspeakable as a moment of time that held historical human suffering and atrocity without words but was felt through performance art and memorial sites (188). So, how does duppy connect to this unspeakability? Does this figure mark a memory of a time that brings so much grief that one should cover their mouth? You see it, but you dare not speak of it. Canadian and Trinidadian-born author Dionne Brand speaks to this omnipresence in her book A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. By sharing personal narratives of Afro-Caribbean life, she connects felt experiences in Canada through a historical, socio-political lens. Her prose is very poetic as to enhance her auto-ethnographic accounts. From this, you get a sense that her vernacular crosses the boundaries of then, now, thereafter. These hints of present 3 duppy has other names throughout the Caribbean such as jumbie. 9 pasts open to this conversation of the unspeakable by sharing honest and revealing anecdotes, which are at time uncomfortable to read. I am inspired by how Brand utilizes prose as an analogical dialogue to express the interconnected relations within the Afro-diasporic experience. A form of anecdotal writing that I am similarly attempting in this thesis. Brand imagines a door as a “… mythic and real location but also imagines an encounter between the returned from diaspora and those who were held…” (Sharpe 18). Brand further describes this Door of no Return as: … the historical moment which colours all moments in the Diaspora…The door exists as an absence. A thing in fact which we do not know about, a place we do not know. Yet it exists as the ground we walk. Every gesture our bodies make somehow gestures towards this door. What interests me primarily is probing the Door of No Return as consciousness. The door casts a haunting spell on personal and collective consciousness in the Diaspora. Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. (Brand 25) Brand speaks to the Middle Passage as an absent but present door; as a memory, a moment, a figure—emergent. This door exists within the same temporal dimensions as duppy intuitively. This intuitive sense—inlaid with memory, story, experience, and the experience of ancestors through intergenerational trauma—is directly linked with duppy’s corporeal nature. duppy’s body is fragmented. It shapeshifts between human and animal characteristics. However, their body is also unrecognizable as “dead” because they engage with material objects (Various). In this way, the corporeal and incorporeal, body and intuition, cannot be understood as separate entities. Dad would tell me, if a duppy wasn’t involved with any trickery, it generally meanders on our astral plane—longing for human indulgence and experiences. This desire to experience life blurs the “boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead…” which is 10 thus seen as “permeable” (Weinstock 267). Duppy’s haunting then becomes a “…relentless remembering and reminding…” (Huber 18) because of its strong connection to the past (Weinstock 267). From the perspective of the settler society, duppy refuses to disappear, to which Sandra Huber quotes from Tuck and Ree: as “…generative for (ghosts) [for] this refusal to stop is its own form of resolv[e]” (qtd. In Huber 18). It is here that we recognize that duppy is not just an ambiguous ghost but is also the dead. duppies reside at the site of silk-cotton trees (Ceiba pentandra) of Jamaica. It is impossible for such a dwelling place not to evoke the history of colonial violence. Why does duppy reside there? duppy exists only to do things that are most common: eat, walk, drink, smoke, sing, and cook. Why is this? duppy is summoned for protection. Why? This leads me to affirm duppy as more than a metaphorical allegory4 but as an ontological being who is conceived by trauma and exists because of cultural and self-preservation, and therefore corporal in nature. In this case, duppy is a haunting spectral, which Huber quotes from Derrida, “[they] exist in time that is always “out of joint” and from this space, teaches us how to know” (qtd. In Huber 17). Uncovered knowledge from this “out of joint” characteristic can be felt in duppy’s vernacular. The typeface etches into the paper differently from its European counterpart (ghost). Their name shapes your mouth and tongue in ways that call for a moment of pause. It’s culturally entrenched understanding brings meaning and memory before orality. This is where anticipation is felt in ways that are beyond its definition. 4 I speak from a place where my father would dissuade my curiosity to duppy by shaping their stories of encounters as warning for children. 11 When I was young, dad said to me, “If you’re afraid to eat the eye, you can never eat the head”. Years later, I asked him what that meant, and he replied, “you already know what it means.” It means what it means. duppy is a part of that fact. Our conversation reminds me that I must trust my instincts and in this way, through sense, I will know how to navigate duppy in my art practice with consideration and care. 1.3 Relational Composites —the bastard cedar, the physic nut and shy shim-mi-lady, mimosa pudica to you. On their shoulders he always placed the sin-generated afflictions of the human world. They felt it. The bastard cedar’s eyes were quick to tears. One little hurt and its sap would flow right through the bark on to the side of the tree producing enough gum to fill a jar bottle and to seal a world of envelopes. And often times Mass Cyrus used these same tears turned to gum, to glue together a broken heart or a broken relationship until the organism could manage on its own again. (Brodber 2-3) I read this passage to my father from the book Myal (1988), written by Jamaican-born poet Erna Brodber. He excitedly told me about the shy shim-mi-lady flower and how its open petals would close once it sensed folks nearby. I enjoy listening to my father’s form of narration. He would always include intriguing anecdotes of the Land between Canada and Jamaica that can only be seen once someone stops and notices. One of my fondest memories of “noticing” was when I caught sight of a bee digging into a little white flower. I asked my father what it was doing. He said, “It’s taking the pollen and nectar.” “What is nectar?” I asked. Vexed, my father plucked one of the little white flowers and pinched its core between his brown thumb and finger, which produced a bulb of yellowish dew. 12 “See, Michaela. And you can eat it,” he said, and drank the drop. After that, I did the same. Every year, I consume the nectar of that one little flower. This gesture is contemplative for me. It brings forth nostalgia and inner stability with an added benefit to quelling hunger. In other words, this gesture incorporates the experience of the body (satiation) and intuitive sensing, connecting my body to stories and knowledge from my father, and by extension, ancestors. This gesture is relational. In considering my relations to duppy within the scope of my practice, I first consider what or who “relations” are. French-Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant states that “Relations informs not simply what is relayed but also the relative and the related. Its always approximate truth is given in a narrative” (Glissant 27). Therefore, relations are not simply my family, cultures, and ancestors, but the stories of these things and the Lands in which they live(d). As Glissant writes, “Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of a shared knowledge” (8). The existence of duppy speaks to this shared knowledge. The practice of sharing knowledge—of constructing relations between each other and surrounding space(s) through spoken or unspoken acts—intertwines duppy’s ontology as a familiar spectre (within the Caribbean community) because they hold space through memory, story, and experience. This space is described by scholar and writer Macarena Gomez-Barris as a “microspace,”5 a location 5 Gomez-Barris term ‘microspaces’ was inspired by Edouard Glissant theory of relationality which calls forth a “renewed perception of difference” that opens “…hidden worlds of opacity…” (2-3). Gomez-Barris encourages to acknowledge the “too-often-ignored network of relationality…” (2). 13 of “interaction and encounter within geographies where coloniality has left and continues to leave a deep imprint” (2). This notion of microspace perhaps further evokes duppy’s in-betweenness. As a result, the spectre of duppy also acts as a remembrance of the ongoing effects of dispossession caused by the Middle Passage—like the Door of No Return. Erna Brodber’s writing express the collective fear of becoming duppy: dispossession. In Myal, Brodber links this dispossession to colonialism, and writes against this colonialism not only in the content of her ideas, but through syntax and word choice. Brodber refuses colonial verbiage by applying Jamaican patois, poetry, and Afro-religiosity centrefold, while exploring how colonialism continues to impact folks through the concept of “spirit thievery,” a form of extraction where an individual inserts a parasitic relationship with a specific host. This act can either be in a spiritual form: stealing vitality, youth, or knowledge. Another is capital gain: an “aestheticization of colonial appropriation” (Feng 160). Taken their knowledge of their original and natural world away from them and left them empty shells—duppies, zombies, living deads capable only of receiving orders from someone else and carry them out. (Brodber 107) To contextualize the reverberating effects of dispossession within the Caribbean diaspora, I look to Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born and British cultural scholar who explores the complexities and transformative nuances of cultural identity within the relationship of the Other in his essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”. He references Franz Fanon’s observation that colonialism is “not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip…” but desires to continue expropriation by “…turn[ing] to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys…” (Hall 224). 14 We see this abuse depicted on the duppy’s body: animalized, fragmented, and obscured. A theme I continue exploring in my artistic process. Although subjected to external control, duppy is feared by its power to enthrall. Both Hall and Glissant unpack how Otherness stems from relational difference brought by the “traumatic character of ‘the colonial experience,’” (Hall 225). Hall notes that there is a “dominate discourse” of controlled representation in colonial society which dictates how Otherness is portrayed (225). Canadian art historian Charmaine A. Nelson similarly identifies these tactics of dominate discourses in societal representation through visual language in her text Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (2010). Nelson notes the importance of enhancing phenotypes of Black and brown bodies, “…detailing specific or extraordinary features” (54). This practice highlights how the composition was strategic to convey a message of subaltern status and Other (Nelson 48). For example, when I observe Canadian artist Prudence Heward’s portrait, Dark Girl (1935), I notice the backdrop is one of tropical bush—a forest setting not found in Canada—and not of Douglas Fir amongst little white flowers. Heward, a white settler woman from Montreal, exoticized her model by relocating her to a different geographical place. Knowing that both the artist and the model are located in Canada, the combination of this altered setting, and the model’s posture, facial expression, and nudity projects onto me a status of non-belonging through de-territorialization. I would argue that this depiction of “outsider-ship,” correlates to Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, for it is conveyed here as “…hold[ing] together [of] opposites, whose only former identity existed in their opposition to the Other” (Glissant 14). 15 As I recollect how my childhood peers commented on the weirdness of consuming nectar on the playground, I notice the strangeness of this act. Is this because colonial “power [is made] to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’” (Hall 225)? Since duppy is of African origins, are they, like the model of Dark Girl, displaced since my father shared their memory with me, a woman who lives in Canada? Considering displacement, do I have the power to alter duppy’s relational embodiment from “horrific” Other into emergent being through creative practice? To avoid feeling overwhelmed by these personal inquiries, I like to imagine duppy’s cosmology as an underbelly of a creature swimming deep below, obscured, impossible to grasp or see clearly, but one that, if I reach for it, I may feel it, soft and oleaginous. This softness echoes duppy’s spectrality as a returned present past which holds a relational quality of existence that I would interpret as one of the many ways duppy’s voice becomes life. emerging through fog… …breath that exhales smoke and thus spirit6. Once buried but now alive, duppy becomes a “re-telling of the past” which can inform relations as liminal and transformative, for it folds and unfolds onto themselves, creating a landscape of composites and hybridity (Hall 224-25). An emergence found through transformation and ingestion—a pause within the landscape filled with nectar and pollen. These moments are what transforms the immaterial to material bonds. 6 The idea of breath, wind, and air is an essential element within Caribbean spiritually. God / Jah is one who breathes life. Wumkes details how breath correlates throughout each spiritual group (Obeah, Myal, Rastafari, and Kumina) as reflective to life and healing. I am connecting this idea to the ephemerality of duppy; a being who can become smoke or fog (24). 16 1.4 Body as a form of taboo When I write to you, it is sometimes to you, the other woman, and other times it is to you, my reader. I am a becoming-specter, haunting and haunted, a future-ghost, a cyclops, a stain. (Tuck and Ree 643) Figure 1.4.1: mob mentality (self-portrait with siblings), 12’’x12’’, charcoal on somerset, (2021) duppy—in memory and body—passes through temporal dimensions as an ephemeral being. Through encounters of relations and the Other, we are reminded that duppy is situated as a Caribbean ontological figure whose bodily essence mimics the very fabric of diasporic experience. By phasing between social boundaries, duppy’s elusive maneuvering communicates a “yearning for alternate space(s)” that can flex in-between cultural dichotomies, which is perceived as taboo or forbidden behaviour (Missouri 4). I admire duppy’s emergent qualities, as a figure which is consistent and persistent, never-ending and chaotic, transparent yet opaque for they endlessly unfold and fold onto themselves. In Édouard Glissant’s chapter entitled “The Relative and Chaos” in his book Poetics of Relation, he renounces linearity—in science, political order, and relation—by introducing Chaos (chaos-monde) as subject to poetic vulnerability and 17 “…endless transformations” to which he rediscovers relational poetics through “…the abysses of art…” (137-138). duppy re-emerges in various times, throughout multiple forms, and is awakened by diverse memories. duppy is endlessly non-linear. Relation is learning more and more to go beyond judgements into the unexpected dark of art’s upsurgings. Its beauty springs from the stable and the unstable, from the deviance of many particular poetics and the clairvoyance of relational poetics. (Glissant 138-139) duppy’s transmutable body can dissolve into smoke or take the form of any animal (i.e., cow, dog, mongoose, and horse among others). They are a figure who physically exudes, which therefore can “leak” out of “containers of confinement” (Huber 18). Through Chaos relations, I believe duppy’s turbulent corporality translates the desire to disrupt essentialist hegemony (Glissant 139). As a figure whose relations involves resistance7, I’ve come to understand that our kinship is not only tethered to diasporic positions but to the familiar space of existing in-between them. Stuart Hall illustrates the “unfixed” and “fixed” positions within Caribbean identities; as “two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture” (226). I project my own experiences as a “Canadian” onto this imaginary graph, notating the moments where my racial status was either not enough or too much. As a child, experiences with colourism and the “one drop rule”8 resurfaced moments when referred by teachers as mulatto, which prompted feelings of uncertain ambivalence. 7 As said by Wumkes in page 7, I am speaking to the historical legacy of Obeah practitioners who utilized their magic to empower forcibly enslaved folks and indentured servants in Jamaica. Nanny of the Maroons is an infamous figure within this regard. 8 The “one drop rule” refers to the systematic racial measurement of African ancestry within genetics (post-slavery context). If an individual had more than 1/8 of African blood, they were legally considered “Black” (Nelson149). This “obsessive quantification of race” is utilized to decern people who have invisible blackness (Nelson149). This form of social classification was also enforced upon Indigenous populations specifically in Canada (60s scoop; Residential Schools) and Australia (stolen generation). 18 Though this term indicates that I am born from Black and white parents, it does not accurately embody who I am as an individual. Like many one-dimensional stereotypes and assumptions of what it means to be a “Black” person in North America, the term mulatto comes with its own reductive characterizations. Within its name, mulatto animalizes mixed-race folks by referring to the sterile offspring born from a donkey and horse; a mule (Joseph 13). Ralina L. Joseph, an American academic, reminds readers in her book, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial, that the development of this classification is directly related to past anti-miscegenation laws described in “…prohibit[ing] marriage among white, Black and [Indigenous] people” as a device to solidify racial hierarchies in North America9 (Joseph 11). This outdated law still influences today’s media by reinforcing stereotypical archetypes like the “tragic mulatta” and the “exceptional mulatta.” Both Joseph and Nelson speak to this forbidden mixing as corruptive counter parts to white subjects. I am critical when absorbing visual media that play into these themes, for I am an active participant of what bell hooks call the Oppositional Gaze. With this, I imagine Glissant and hooks in conversation with each other: Glissant states, “Passivity plays no part in Relation” (137), and hooks explains why, that “there is power in looking” (“The Oppositional Gaze” 94). Through bell hook’s Oppositional Gaze, I understand how visual media has warped the image of mixed-race folks’ through fetishized representations that cast subliminal ideologies based on 9 Though this is coming from an American point of view, I would argue that the USA have some influence to Canadian society for we share the same space, engage with trade, and are both colonial societies. Charmaine A Nelson goes into further detail about the history of forced enslavement relations between Canada and the USA. 19 racist paradigms and thus, mystify mixed-race folks as existing figures emblematic of “taboo”—figures who are ostracized, emotionally unstable, frequently victims of violence, unintelligent, and hypersexual—whose “salvation” is only through racial “transcendence” (Joseph 11, 31). …the placement of subaltern bodies deceptively hardens spatial binaries, in turn suggesting that some bodies belong, some bodies do not belong, and some bodies are out of place. (McKittrick xv) These “hardened spatial binaries” can also be considered in their application of essentializing conceptions not only of mixed-race people, but of members of the African diaspora more generally. A diaspora, by definition, is a people dispersed from their original homeland. As such, the term implies a status of geographic un-belonging. Essentialist ideology specifically relies on reductive characterizations of people and the static continuity of such characterizations. But diverse geographies of diasporic identities mean these identities adapt with their various geographies and are “far from being eternally fixed in some essentialist past” (Hall 225); they are forever in a state of transformation. Such a state refutes essentialist notions, complicating the “…overlapping physical, metaphysical, theoretical, and experiential…” contours within the “overlap[ping] subjectivities, imaginations, and stories” that are interconnected with diasporic livelihoods (McKittrick xiii). In other words, there is no singular, static way of being a member of the African diaspora expect perhaps, in the shared experience of navigating through the mire of essentialist ideology that consistently attempts to define and limit the scope of these experiences. This tension—in seeking to understand my place within the African diaspora while also rejecting essentialist 20 notions that seek to define this place—are what I am confronted with inside and outside the studio, and are negotiated within myself, my family, and the materials I employ. Together, duppy and I look at how we navigate places we reside and how others perceive us. Home—in a sense that involves both uprooted displacement and uninvited occupation. wenge wood ackee mongoose Geography—in a sense, that is coloured by the body, but its contours are defined by colonial conquest (McKittrick xiii). hair and breasts pavlova bottle caps In this perspective, my civil relationship with two commonwealth countries—Canada and Australia—relates to both love and hegemonic disempowerment. 21 1.4.1 Taboo as emergent magic Figure 1.4.1.1: duppy pelt, 182cm long, charcoal and pencil crayon on rice paper draped over cypress tree (2021) Taboo: suspicious of difference. Liminality: chaotic for its endless “vertigo,” inducing transformations, supporting and obscuring racial and cultural ambiguity (Glissant 136,138). Black mixed-race10 folks bleed in-between phenotypes and do not come out systematically the same. Curl pattern and melanin vary. As these features disrupt identity and social order within a white settler society—one that thrives on categorizing everything—the boundary-crossing duppy seeks to blur dichotomy. I find working in a hybrid sensibility dissolve confines by challenging the “taboo” which allows freedom for familial love. Their “spectral dissemination”11 highlights 10This observation can be applied to other mixed-race groups. 11Huber quotes Tuck and Ree’s use of “spectral dissemination” as to solidifying how corporal ghosts will always “leak past containers” as a figure that cannot be contained which “asserts it is not going away, despite attempts to 22 duppy’s ever-shifting existence as both “alive and dead, human and animal,” symbolically abject and non-conformant (Creed 61, Huber 18). One might say that the horrifying aspects shared between duppies and mixed-race people is that you don’t know who you are talking to. Firelei Báez, a Dominican artist, born to a Dominican mother and Haitian father, explores the “too-often-unrecognized history[ies] of the Caribbean” within “African and Latin American diaspora” relations through the figure La Ciguapa (Fontaine 58). La Ciguapa is a Dominican trickster figure whose form is “completely ambiguous…it can be a mongoose or of a woman” but what is certain is “that her legs are backwards—if you follow their footsteps, you [are] going in the wrong direction” (Mehdaoui 04:07-04:33 minutes). Through the FCCS Graduate Student Research and Travel Award, I was able to view Báez art pieces Years of holding your tongue (2018) and Ooloi Ciguapa (mass pedigrees of masterpieces unsold) (2018) 12. These artworks were part of a group exhibition called Relations: Diaspora and Painting, on display at the Esker Foundation, Calgary Alberta. Báez employs acrylic, gouache, ink, and graphite to explore concepts like mixed-race and cultural identities, female sexuality, and landscapes through this figure, critiquing the hyper-sexualization of Caribbean women’s bodies and relearning colonial “(hi) stories” (Fontaine 58-59). I find her work and artistic research inspirational because of how we both look to our cultural backgrounds as testimonies to more pluralistic ways of living. In this approach, she refers to Édouard Glissant’s concept of “archipelagic thinking” (pensée wish it gone” (18). By connecting spectral dissemination to duppy, I want to bind the ‘freedom of passage’ as an imperative element to duppy’s spectrality. 12 You can view images of these artworks at the Esker Foundation website: https://eskerfoundation.com/artist/firelei-baez/ 23 archipélique) 13. By hybridizing La Ciguapa’s body to flora found in the Dominican Republic, I view Báez work as inserting a rebellious invitation: the figure rejects the hypersexualized female mixed-race bodies, and instead blend within everything, a complicated “passing.” By embracing the fluctuations embedded in hybridity, I am freeing myself from essentialist expectations. I am able to find peace far from the gaze of others by moulting my body into various forms, like La Ciguapa—like duppy. …duppy is a curious being, capable of assuming various forms of men and other animals. This supernatural power which it is believed to have, enables it to turn into a shadow and vanish away. It is said that the duppy can attack and ruin both man and beast. (Various 3) The mongoose (Herpestes javanicus) is (one of the many) species introduced in the West Indies and “New World” tropical regions throughout the 1870s (Horst et.al 409). It is common knowledge that duppy is known to shapeshift into this animal. Some believe that to witness this is a sign of bad luck. Both beings share subaltern statuses, for their histories are linked to the extraction and displacement resulting from colonial whims. Possessed as “workers” mongooses support crops like sugar cane, banana, cotton, and Indigo from perceived threats of Indigenous “vermin” (Horst et.al 409). Currently, the mongoose is deemed “murderable” because of its opportunistic nature; its omnivorous capacity to eat all—including small rodents, birds, insects, fruits, and vegetables—resulted in extreme ecological degradation in the Caribbean (Horst et.al 410). Feral Feminisms invites “liminal animals” as inspirational non-human vanguards capable 13 I find it intriguing that Firelei Báez also refers to Édouard Glissant which tells me that he is an important philosopher to know in diasporic conversations. 24 of evading domination and control from patriarchal gazes (Struthers Montford and Taylor 6). My admiration for the mongoose lies in just that; as a fiercely independent, brave, and rebellious creature(s) who traverses the shadows “in-between the domesticated and the wild” is capable of adapting to human society but resides within the dark corners where light cannot penetrate (Struthers Montford and Taylor 5). Figure 1.4.1.2: duppy pelt, 182cm long, charcoal and pencil crayon on rice paper draped over cypress tree (2021) Thinking about ways to reclaim autonomy from dispossession, objectification, and misrepresentation calls forth a “renewed self-possession” (Missouri 29). I consider Montré Aza Missouri’s “Black Magic Woman” archetype as a figure that embodies this attribute: a renewed self-possession through the communion of Afro-Religiosity and Womanist qualities ingrained in her constitution (29). Missouri stresses that this character is to subvert the “tragic mulatta” trope by embracing her hybridity—acknowledging the “historical interconnectedness within cultural identity across the America’s”—and embracing her "devotion to the diaspora community,” and 25 this community’s “ability to imagine alternative” futures through “everyday actions as protest to oppressive forces” (2-3, 29). Missouri references African American scholar Judylyn S. Ryan’s comment that Black women filmmakers are “literary counterparts” to “spiritual conjurers” because of how they can “repossess the image of black women and construct ‘participatory’ space in which multiple female voices can be heard (2005:131)” (5). Through this understanding, we consider how acts of artistic creation illuminate Black Magic Woman as a figure who contributes to culture and being within the Afro-diaspora lineage in the ways in which cultural “greyness” and in-betweenness, interrogates hegemonic spaces through hybrid sensibilities (Missouri 5). “Conjure work” is, in fact, prompts spectators to recognize that mysticism is an important location for material perseverance for many women within the diaspora (Wumkes 21). Referencing various avenues of “magic” and “supernatural” becomes—I think—a reclamation of self-possession. duppy, a figure associated with mysticism and perceived as an animalistic monster, for they can transform into a mongoose. The abject qualities of this transformation incite antipathy for they do not obey borders and its monstrosity can be inferred by its hybrid embodiment (Kristeva 4). “They tumble over into non-sense or the impossible real, but they appear even so in spite of “myself”” (Kristeva 11). I conceptualize duppy pelt (see fig. 1.4.1.1 and fig. 1.4.1.2) as a part of this conversation: I experience renewed self-possession by embracing the liminal qualities of mixed “black” and “white” racial status; by deciding which animal I relate to through plurality and displacement, rather than utility and sexual objectification; and finding spiritual freedom while constructing a path to better understand my family’s geographic sensibilities. duppy pelt(s) attempts to translate 26 these “immaterial” moments: racial and gendered experiences, ruptures of social status and so on; into the “material” through creative making. This way of creation presents the liminal qualities of duppy more tangible. A quality that you can see from viewing the work from outside. Acknowledging the fact that this path is branded as “forbidden” in relation to duppy, difference, geography, and hybridity, only tells me that it is required conversation between us and otherworldly dimensions. For they are necessary knowledges that can teach us how to embrace the emergent qualities of our world. “…disorder one can imagine forever” (Glissant 133). 27 Chapter 2: wake work as Research-Creation My earliest memory of duppy was through taste. This was a time when my taste buds were extremely sensitive to Scotch bonnet, but the flavour of the pepper was too good to not swallow. Jerk seasoning held heat so strong that a sneeze meant its presence was still in the air. Stuart Hall expresses the relationship with cultural history and identity “like the child’s relationship to a mother, is always-already” (226). I would say this is akin to my infatuation with Caribbean cuisine. The best part of this was that Dad knew how to make jerk chicken right. When I started eating other people’s dishes, I noticed that duppy had many forms. Its bodily essence changed based on who was attempting to evoke it. Auntie Avril had a particular expertise in drawing duppy in curry chicken and roti by burning the curry so as to toast the cumin, then swaddled the chicken and potato with a warm roti covering. Uncle Llyod’s patties were flaky and moist. Auntie Doris’s oxtail was always fresh with a good amount of dumpling. I would say that these dishes are good examples of how to conduct a séance with duppy because you can taste the spirit imbued into the dish because of the making (love and care). There were times that I encountered those who couldn’t wake duppy. It was in these moments when I wanted to know how to rouse these figures, and after noting that desire to know, I personally felt them. In between my fingers now, trimmed raw chicken thighs and mixed seasoning and herbs; Indigo and banana; wood and prickly rose. duppy, this enigmatic figure of Afro-diasporic memory, emerges during cultural practices such as cooking and grooming. Through recreating my parents’ recipes, I am thus in a working relationship alongside duppy. A methodological process that I aim to recreate in my art studio. 28 When I contemplate duppy and my lived experiences in Canada as an individual who is linked to the diaspora, I recognize that I am participating in what scholar Christina Sharpe terms “wake work”. In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe locates Black artists as working in the wake of colonialist and imperialist violence: “Living in/the wake of slavery is living ‘the afterlife of property’…in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother” (15). This non/status and non/being is perpetuated through continued systemic anti-Black racism. Sharpe describes the paradox of this systemic violence, that while the terrors of this violence are visited upon Black bodies, “in much of what passes for public discourse about terror we, Black people, become the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment, and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments” (15). Sharpe explores how literature, performance, and visual culture observe and mediate this ongoing violence, “our abjection from the realm of the human,” and argues that “rather than seeking a resolution to blackness’s ongoing and irresolvable abjection, one might approach Black being in the wake as a form of consciousness” (14). In this way, “wake work” does not emphasize an outcome or product of such work, but the practice, the process, the movement toward a consciousness of the paradox of Black being, of liminal space: “Wakes are processes; through them we think about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which enact grief and memory” (Sharpe 21). A movement toward such enigmatic and slippery space—this oleaginous way of being—evokes the positionality of duppy. I might suggest “duppy work” or “duppy consciousness” as an alternative term to embody this relational work. Sharpe looks to artists who: 29 do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use the wake in all of its meanings as a means of understanding how slavery’s violence’s emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as in Black modes of resistance. (Sharpe 14) For me, artists like painters and sculptures Wengechi Mutu and David Hammons, painter Firelei Baez, and authors Erna Brodber and Dionne Brand are engaged in wake work. These are artists who do not seek to resolve social abjection but instead work within its parameters to find alternative ways of presence and to express the complexity of culture and identity through a decolonial practice (Sharpe 14). The mediums I engage with—charcoal, beeswax, wood, indigo and hair—are a part of this conversation and work. My methodological framework is configured by inherited practices: grooming and cooking, observation and memory, hybridity and agency, acceptance and self-love. In this way, I am engaged in wake work, in practice and process that does not seek resolution, but leans into the paradoxes and impossibility of resolving the tensions and histories of my Black mixed-race body and experience. Research-creation offers interdisciplinary practice for artists, like myself, a platform for alternative ways of exploring knowledges that are not normally accepted within the institution (Loveless 40). I am excited by this as it provides me an opportunity to connect further with my 30 family and our culture—a topic that is purely relational. This is where research-creation complements wake work, for “contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, and material dimensions of Black non/being” (Sharpe 14, 20) meet the artistic process, and through this process, become a legitimate form of “…transmissible knowledge…” that has potential to expand relational understanding for ontological non/beings through art-making (Loveless 29). I find myself understanding duppy and the natural order of the world by observing; how my father cleans goat (see fig.2.1). Figure 2.1: Dad washing goat, photographed at home, (summer 2021) Washing the meat with vinegar. Rinsing. Caring for the being and treating it with dignity as a way to provide thanks for its sacrifice. This same sort of care and attention is applied when he and mum would wash my hair as a child. 31 Wide tooth comb. Hold the roots. Knots will always exist. My memories with food and grooming practices bridge how immaterial acts of relational rituals become material connections through making. The cleaning of meat, trimming the excess, and dedicating time in front of the pot are parallel to the cleaning, trimming, and time spent with hair. By putting into practice the generational ways of making as to provide the most restorative properties the ingredients and tools are not separate from the attentive hands that and memories that facilitate their transformation. We are of the earth and from the stars, cooked mud and pigmented wax, soot and soda, ink, wood, tobacco, fur, fire, bronze, and acrylic nails — mortal inhabitants of the earth dreaming of our spiritual or extraterrestrial foil. (Thompson 53) Indigo: a plant; being; blue; natural dye; reflects the journey of metamorphosis. By incorporating this plant into my making, a wooden stake becomes more than a Land marker. A bottle cap inscribed by a Jamaican proverb becomes an incantation. Beeswax becomes a salve—to soothe hurt. Like duppy, these mediums also voice the dead. Discarded objects, who’ve served their supposed purpose for someone else, once now 32 forgotten are made anew. When working with these materials and infusing them with Indigo, I imagine that my grandmother’s spirit is by my side as I stir the vat. Considered motions like observation, felt measurement(s), and attention can be seen as in memoriam. I attempt to conjure duppy through a ceremonial studio-based process built on sustenance. This requires patience and ingestion— “hauntological; it is a work of haunting, a wake of sorts, where the specters of the undead make themselves present” (qtd. In Sharpe 38). When I grasp and place my artwork in the Land, the Indigo is lifted from the surface. Would this touch then, become my grandmother’s kiss? For was it not duppy who taught her to persevere, who taught my father, who then taught me? In hopes of sharing these encounters of sentimentalities—within my art practice—I aspire them to be an extension of relational bonds. 2.1 Grooming duppy You will witness a great sense of harmony at twilight when you peer onto Okanagan Lake. Its surface becomes an expansive obsidian mirror. A different type of blackness compared to the night sky hovering over Mohkinstsis. The lake’s glassy reflection is framed by tḿtm‘nýʔip (snowberry) (Barnes) and prickly rose. While wading in the waters—allowing the lake to flood your pores—you can catch the moon watching quietly, like a mum making sure you properly rinse the shampoo out of your hair. My interest in grooming the Land was inspired by the VISA 520 course theme site/ation which coincided with the Summer Indigenous Art Intensive (IAI) (2021) facilitated by Tania Willard. Site/ation brings into question where bodies meet and/or occupy Land—as an extended conversation of Land Acknowledgement. This includes exploring non-extractive art 33 methodologies through Indigenous knowledge frameworks. Returning to scholar Macarena Gomez-Barris, they insist that through a “submerged perspective”, relations between the Land, beings, and non/beings are key to unlocking other “knowledge[s], vitality, and livability” so as to decolonize extractive methods and promote deeper bonds with our surroundings (1-2). It is imperative to bring the body outside—away from concrete construction or milled, treated walls that aim to disguise the life and liminality of the Land. As Victor Steffensen writes in Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology, “You have to take notice of the country, otherwise you will get lost” (238). As someone who seeks belonging, being born and raised in Mohkinstsis, and connected to two different groups of people while I am occupying Turtle Island brings into question: where does Land meet home? Is this path decided by ourselves or predetermined? In the summer of 2021, I particularly felt lost in the Land because of geographic displacement and subsequent isolation. As a result, these anxieties manifested in the state of my hair. Loose strands or frequent knots in my curls then become this personal signifier of these acute stressors. Straightening my hair helps disguise this emotion. 34 Figure 2.1.1: the arm of a prickly rose brush (Rosa acicularis) (spring 2021) When my hair was at its most difficult, Uncle Johnny mentioned that I needed to pray more. Considering his advice, I brought my body outside, where I meditated about my family and how I missed them dearly. Guiding my gaze to the west of the Platypus House, the colloquial name for the former UBCO graduate studios, I was confronted by a prickly rose brush (Rosa acicularis) (see fig. 2.1.1). This felt like a wake-up call, as if the Land was responding to my distress by reminding me that I am not separated from my family, for we are still sharing the same space. The provincial colonial divides of (so-called) British Columbia and Alberta are abstracted and do not dictate how the wind and animals carry seeds between the prairies, the Rockies, or the desert. Indigenous perception of nature does not divide itself from other realms of reality; instead, it apprehends from “an original state of undifferentiation. (Gomez-Barris 3) 35 The act of leaving the studio and practicing prayer on the Land—I felt—received an answer that I need to recognize my geography, the liminal potentials it holds, to which poetic singularities exist before my eyes. In essence, duppy, a liminal being, can traverse and live within this landscape because I carry them in blood, body, and memory. As Dr. Sakiru Adebayo put so eloquently in his presentation titled Complex Implication: Privilege, Possibility and Racialized Immigration in Canada, “memory is migratory, and place is unstable”. Because of my diasporic connections—I believe that allowing myself to give into insecurities of place-based displacement consents to the legacy of colonial attempts to possess Black and brown female bodies, such as those attempts described by scholar and author Katherine McKittrick, through the reliance of Black women labour (McKittrick xiv, xviii). McKittrick interrogates these questions of reclaiming place-based autonomy by addressing that Black bodies are very much geographic because of spatial relations (McKittrick xiii). My connection to exploring duppy through an interest of renewing self-possession, inspired by the Black Magic Woman, which embraces duppy fully, frames multiplicity, and address spatial binaries. Throughout my thesis, I’ve identified these points to some extent—interrogating the realms of social realities through my own cultural practices, histories, perception, and experiences to counter erasure which thus activates presence and life in my art. 36 Figure 2.1.2: fingers caught in knotty hair, photography, and textile, (2021) Thinking back to the perceived antagonistic relations between Obeah and their “instruments,” Suzanne Kite, IAI artist-in-residence (2021), reminded me of the importance of building ethical relations to non-beings. She stated that, “in order to create relations with any non-human entities, the first step is to acknowledge, to understand, and to know, that non-humans are beings in the first place (or being). Indigenous ontologies already exist to understand forms of beings…and to not acknowledge this, divorces the framework” entirely (Kite and Willard). As someone who is conducting “duppy work,” I inquire about the ethical relations I have with my grooming tools: comb, washcloth, oil, and cream. Am I acknowledging their own unique way of being? Does mutual respect exist between myself and the comb as it rubs against my oiled scalp? Can reciprocity be fostered within this dynamic and be applied to the Land? 37 Knowing that good hair growth derives from good skin, can the Afro pick be seen as more than a grooming tool but as an ontological object—in a Caribbean sensibility—that promotes practice through “everyday” cultural practice and beyond. That a potential site of “renewal and responsibility” can evoke reciprocal experience with the Land through the everyday practices (Simpson 192)? As stated by McKittrick “…social practices create landscapes and contribute to how we organize, build, and imagine our surroundings” (xiv). For me, social practice began at a young age, sitting next to my father on the sofa, observing how he removed the dirt beneath my nails. Social practice continued as he would comb our hair. Social practice repeated as I observed how my father raked needles underneath the Douglas Fir. Figure 2.1.3: supporting thicc pick while practicing performance, UBCO campus (2022) 38 Like Black hair, a contentious site, the Land relies on generational memory to care for it. From this, the Land can be thought of as a familiar ghost, a mum, a dad, an ancestor. When they call your name, your inner child cannot help but run towards them. Land and Black hair are perceived as unfamiliar through their abject qualities (beyond shedding), they “[do] not respect borders, positions, rules. [They are] in-between, the ambiguous, the composite,” (Kristeva 4). Thickets, brush, and grass appear to me as various hair types with various kinks. Grooming the Land becomes a site of potential relations—of patience. A potential practice of emergent care. The social practices that define my geography are enmeshed with pride and love that can be seen through work in taking care of bodies and taking care of the Land. As hooks writes, “When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully” (Sisters of the Yam 135). Amidst hardships, I am blessed to have been exposed to this nurture-ship at a young age. I believe this compassion is expressed throughout my artworks. I often recall visiting the farms of family friends as a child. Through these relationships—both with Black farmers and the Land, the pastoral plains become familiar. My desire to comb the Land is related to this relationship of love and pride (see. fig 2.1.3). Ponderosa pine and cedar become less like extractive materials and more like extensions of limbs that long for a hug. bark become flesh branches become hair 39 2.2 Materializing duppy Figure 2.2.1: Indigo flower, from trash can Indigo vat, (summer 2021) Experiential encounters that encompass thoughts, feelings, and relations are, in essence, immaterial connections—that can only be described through intuition or sensation. But this absent-yet-present immaterial experience can occupy space. duppy mimics this sentimentality in the way they paradoxically occupy both the material and the immaterial, traversing ontological boundaries. Now, how can we also materialize these experiences and bonds? Can the material act as a transformative device to communicate these immaterial moments? The cultivation of Indigo (Indigofera) is as old as time itself. A variety of plants across the globe contain the compound indican, which is the main component with the power to stain blue (Indigotin) (Postrel 111). You can find these Indigofera varieties in South Asia, Africa, Europe, Japan, and the Americas (Postrel 111). Considering the relational practice of Indigo, the memory of duppy, and my geography requires recognition of the socio-economic complexities 40 rooted to this plant. These complexities include how Indigo’s agricultural demand and production is intertwined with slavery and indentured servitude. Like duppy, Indigo is also entangled with displacement, domination, and conquest. In the 1700s, rather than purchasing Indigo from India, many European countries developed Indigo plantations in the Caribbean and in the Americas (Nadri 124). Jamaica was one of the West Indies colonies that produced large quantities of Indigo through slave labour throughout the eighteenth century (Nadri 132). That said, Indigo production came to a halt after European trade bans, disputes, and duties arose (Nadri 133-34). Other than historical accounts of exploitation, the relations between Indigo and duppy are congruent, for their creative potential is manifested through cultural practice. Before capital possession, people over millennia observed and worked with Indigo. As we grew on the Land, Indigo grew with us. We’ve noticed that when this plant soaks in temperate water, blue emerges (Postrel 116). The substance released from this wade is indicant and also the enzyme indoxyl that enables indican to react to oxygen, which, in turn, transforms this natural dye into blue (Indigotin) (Postrel 112-13). You witness this reaction when you glance at the top of the Indigo vat, where fermented blue purple-ish foam (flower) floats on the surface (see. fig.2.2.1). A literal form of materializing the immaterial. 41 Figure 2.2.2: Unknown Artists, tye-dyed cloth (adire oniko) with full moon (osu bamba), 201 x 510.5 cm, Seattle Art Museum permanent collection, https://indigo.site.seattleartmuseum.org/portfolio/africa/africa-tie-dye/. I am drawn to the transformative qualities Indigo evokes, and its culturally entrenched sensibility for techniques with Indigo dyeing vary as much as culture. The adire oniko in Figure 2.2.2, demonstrates this metamorphosis. Adire, meaning “tie and dye” is an Yoruba resistant technique that utilizes stone, seashells, and seeds to create various circular patterns by sewing or wrapping the material/fabric with twine (“V&A Adire –‘tied and dyed’ indigo textiles”). Parts of the design reveal where multiple dips took place, where oxygen had direct contact with the indigotin or no contact at all. From this, I personally interpret osu bamba (full moon) as mapping cyclical motions of time, space, environmental awareness, and feminine anatomy and craft. The chemistry of this natural-dye process doesn’t really interest me, though it is essential to know. Instead, I think of Postrel’s reference to Zvi Koren’s characterization of the ancient peoples who worked with this plant as “advance[d] empirical chemist(s)” (110). This affirms that 42 a working relationship with natural-dyes are experiential and relational. In my experience with Indigo, relational understanding—felt measurements—becomes just as useful as calculated measurements because sometimes recipes do not need to be perfect to taste good. I’ve witnessed this whenever my mum makes pavlova. She stresses that no grease can touch the white mound of fluff, yet, as she takes a drag from her cigarette, I see ash fall on top. It still tastes great. Instead of calculated or chemical precision, I will take you on my own journey of working with the vat, and it begins with the pot. Figure 2.2.3: curry goat process, (summer 2021) When my father is making curry goat (see fig.2.1 & fig.2.2.3), the process becomes more than just the anticipation of taste but an observance of how that taste is made. If I ask, “Dad, how much curry do you add?”—expecting a measurement like two tablespoons—he replies, “This much.” I apply this same logic to developing an Indigo vat. There are two ways of constructing an Indigo vat (organic or chemical) and this begins with creating the meal that Indigo needs to feed off. I chose to work with an organic vat. An organic vat relies on reducing agents that derive from natural substances like fruit (in this case banana) because they contain high fructose content. The vat holds the fructose in liquid form which will become a home for the dissolved 43 Indigo. By measuring my ingredients through felt gestures, I am able to approximate by relational experience. For example, the amount of over-ripe blackened bananas I use cover most of the countertop space. You need to mash the banana to the same consistency as mashed potatoes (see fig.2.2.4). The pulverized bananas must then be reduced in the pot (with water) at a medium-to-high temperature and then brought down to a low-to-medium temperature (similar to simmering curry goat), which needs to be tasted to see if the fructose is present in the liquid. If fructose is present, the Indigo meal (reducing agent) is now ready. Figure 2.2.4: reducing agent process (left to right); pulverized banana, reduced in water, banana pulp free vat now ready for powdered Indigo (summer 2021). As said before, I base measurement on what feels right. By building the vat through an empirical experience, I rely on my memories of observing and working with my parents in the kitchen. Practicing with Indigo reflects this sentimentality. Being with the pot within the kitchen setting is more comfortable—for me than working with Indigo in the studio. The studio offers space to build, whereas the kitchen holds space for fond memories: 44 Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual; they are watching relatives and friends beside the body of the deceased from death to burial and the accompanying drinking, feasting, and other observances, a watching practiced as a religious observance. (Sharpe 21) When observing, you will bear witness to Indigo’s resurrection. When infused with the reducing agent (banana) and warmed by the stove top, responsibility is bestowed to the dyer (see fig.2.2.4). Though it is a non-human being, it is still being. It is sensitive to the cold, grows hungry, and needs attention. These are constant reminders to the dyer that Indigo is more than material but a material being. My memories with food—brewing, stirring, tasting—are emblematic of preserving life and agency. Figure 2.2.5: dissolved Indigo 45 bell hooks nostalgically referenced her grandfather, Daddy Gus, who “taught [her] that everything in life was a dwelling place for spirits, that one only had to listen to hear their voices” (Sisters of the Yam 1). The voice Indigo evokes is of an oleaginous frequency. Cremated in a mortar and pestle to be reborn. Dissolved into a bath of banana which induce a protective copper sheen that is both green, purple, and blue. Restless but still. Transparent when spilt but opaque when oxidized. Indigo holds space by leaving a stain. Transformation as an adaptive trait to adjust to a new way of life. Working in this way—a type of Black Magic Woman conjuring—feels forbidden but regenerative. Thinking about renewed self-possession reminds me of how cultural cooking becomes contentious because good food represents good health. bell hooks remind us that for imperialist, patriarchal, and white supremacist society to thrive, it relies on marginalized folks to remain unwell (Sisters of the Yam 7, 19). So, the everyday act of cultural cooking is an act of resistance to systemic erasure. Figure 2.2.6: (left) a glimpse of myself during instruction, (right), material used with the vat, plants (crocus, garlic shells, pinecone, pine needles, my hair, face mask, and sunglasses), (winter 2022) 46 Figure 2.2.7: a forgotten hair net that was found at the bottom of my vat (2022) Thinking about relational encounters found in the pot, I continue exploring relations with Indigo by imbuing materials found on the Land into its waters. Like a magpie, I am drawn to certain objects: weathered, discarded, broken, and evidence of use. I had the pleasure to facilitate this type of play for an Indigo dye workshop for a 2nd year sculpture class at UBCO (see fig 2.2.6). When lending my Indigo vat to the group, students were responsible for bringing found and discarded objects. From this, we submerged them into the pool, to which I was able to visually explain the process of working with the natural dye. Through this process, imbuing Indigo to these objects layered more meaning to them. Wooden stakes became more than a Land maker. They became a signifier to the presence of another being(s), non-being(s), and place(s). Like how we desire a specific way of dressing, Indigo dresses the object(s) to evoke presence. 47 Figure 2.2.8: three dips of Indigo on cotton twine (fall 2021) Dad reminds me (daily) that I need to practice good health, which can only be accessed through nature. Through nature, we can connect to the “cosmic life-giving breath” of the universe, and I have observed this life-giving capacity in Indigo (Wumkes 24). Indigo inhales and exhales. Indigo leaves an impression through smell. A “concoct[ion of] ghosts;” relies on intergenerational memory and reoccurring practice (Tuck, Eve, and C. Ree. 643). By sustaining life through considerate art-making, Indigo educates me that one can thrive by living within the ‘in-between.’ This just requires collaborative care. 48 Chapter 3: Effigies This chapter shares the artworks birthed from this MFA candidacy that were included in the group Graduate MFA exhibition Plastic Grass (2022) with cohort Natasha Harvey and Scott Moore at the Lake Country Art Gallery (LCAG), June 4th, 2022, to July 16th, 2022, located in Lake Country, British Columbia, Canada. 3.1 Effigies: thicc pick Figure 3.1.1: thicc pick, black walnut wood, wenge wood, and maple wood, 8ft x 2.5ft, Lake Country Art Gallery, Lake Country (2022) 49 Growing up, I was surrounded by Afro-Caribbean objects made of Lignum vitae wood (an Indigenous Caribbean deciduous tree)—masks, walking staff, mortar, and pestle. When I was young I asked Dad about these objects, and he would say, “You can’t get that wood no more and you can’t find it here…it’s the heaviest wood in the world,”. This left me with the impression that wood was a precious and emotionally valuable material. Wangechi Mutu notes that by adding Kenyan soil and branches within her artistic process, the material(s) mark sentimental notions of home, childhood, and Land (Forster and Lebo 12:15-12:38 minutes). This artistic intention resonates with me, for it reminds me of that exchange I had with my father when I was young. Considering this sensibility and my memories, the Afro pick represents a personal site of rational fondness that I proposed earlier through Édouard Glissant Poetics of Relations which also includes the complicated relations that “extend[s] through a relationship with the Other,” (11). The Afro pick is a symbolically charged object for its connections to civil racial advocacy (i.e.: Black Panthers, Black Power movement and BLM) and is a representation of the existing wakes within the Afro-diaspora experience. The wake as Christina Sharpe describes as “Black being…as a form of consciousness,” a paradox where the irresolvable and continual abjection connects with the spheres of Black “social, political, and cultural belonging; our abjection from the realm of the human” (14). I wanted to engage with this paradox by stepping away from the modern depiction of the Afro pick, an object that is usually manufactured by a two-part mold, and mass produced into a plastic cast 50 piece. Instead, I wanted to re-form the body of the pick out of “natural”14 materials through modern technology. I originally wanted to work with Lignum vitae because of our relational qualities, however, it was too difficult to manipulate at my skill level. I specifically use black walnut wood (Juglans nigra) because it originates from North America, which locates my geography. Wenge wood (Millettia laurentii), an endangered species from various countries in Africa, is intended to reflect the diaspora. It is important for me that the materials reflected my own mixing, but the use of these materials is complicated by the ethics surrounding tree harvesting. This is especially so as I live in a country whose colonial history and contemporary forestry practices relies on the large-scale cutting and milling of coniferous and deciduous trees, and continues to include Old Growth, specifically from British Columbia’s coastal forests. I have faith that the trees used in my works were ethically sourced by the company I purchased them from; their mandate includes a commitment to sustainable harvesting through practices such as tree planting, wildlife conservation, and Land consideration (to whatever extent that may be). To navigate the risk of extraction and exploitation in producing artworks, I turn to my methodological practice, which requires mutual respect, care, and consideration when working with these material beings. I collect and keep all off-cuts and saw dust in small containers (with the intention that they will be used in later works). 14 I am using the word ‘natural’ here to indicate that I see wood as a raw naturally occurring “material being” found within the Land that one encounters frequently. Though some plastics contain organic polymers, I am considering here ‘natural’ as one born with carbon atoms. 51 With the guidance and expertise of technician Philip Wyness, I was able to utilize modern technologies to create thicc pick (2022) (see. fig. 3.1.1). I first presented my design of thicc pic in a sketch to Wyness; he then rendered the design using AutoCAD. This enabled us to translate the drawing to a 3-axis Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine, with the assistance of engineering technician Ryan Mandau. By working in this way, we were able to strategically maximize the output of the work, which subsequently decreased the chances for mistakes and wasted materials. Though I rely on hand tools and machines to help me craft these art pieces, I frame my relationship with these tools as extensions of my hands and fingers. As the comb is used to detangle hair and the rake to collect pine needles, the low-angle jack planer assists me when smoothing the surface of the wood. Through this process I noticed how the Land shaped individualistic qualities between wenge wood and black walnut wood. Figure 3.1.2: thicc pick (detail shot) (2022) 52 one is slightly harder than the other. one’s surface darkens as they age, while the other remains the same. wenge, straight interlocking grain when worked, the smell of chocolate lingers in the air. black walnut, irregular grain meets at the crotch which is highlighted by its chatoyancy. As someone who is contesting “spatial binaries,” a colonial tactic of control through racial-sexual hierarchies that Katherine McKittrick states flattens black femininity as “knowable, unknowing, and expendable: she is seemingly in place by being out of place” (xv), inspired me to contextualize my lived experience within the ‘Canadian’ landscape. By combining two kinds of woods into a singular material being reflects the multiplicity and multi-dimensionality to my Black mixed-race women experience. It is intentional that the craftmanship allowed the materials to be seen separately yet dependent on each other. You can take a moment to appreciate how wenge wood is revered for its versatility in sculptural wood making while acknowledging that Black walnut’s coarse grain allows natural results with tongue oil finishes. Dado grooves expose where the materials converge but also interlock. thicc pick (see. fig 3.1.2) cannot be seen as ‘whole’ if its wenge wood tooth was knocked out. Seams appear as folds of skin or muscle. Grain wavering into each other like stretch marks on hips and thighs. To imagine them as separate pieces would brutalize their being as ‘non-existent’. As said by Wangetchi Mutu: …completely anonymous but completely identifiable and placing them somewhere and drawing their energy from wherever they came from; from molten lava or a million years ago; that is now in my work. (Forster and Lebo 13:30) 53 Like duppy, thicc pick is a specter, an embodiment of memory. Christina Sharpe states that “we must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work; think the ways the hold cannot and does not hold even as the hold remains in the form of semiotics of the slave ship hold, the prison, the womb, and elsewhere…” (21). I think of the Afro pick as an ontological object that extends this conversation. The sculpture becomes evocative of the Black body, the tines of the pick become teeth. They open that would suggest an ingestion. When confronted by this ingestion, it becomes apparent that the wenge wood sticks out. I think of this placement as emblematic of resisting the European beauty standards regarding ‘crooked’ teeth. Gaps between teeth and “snaggle tooths” are perceived as imperfections but, in reality, are elegant. thicc pick’s open mouth and soaring height presents its existence as inescapable. I am swallowed. Figure 3.1.3: thicc pick (detail shot of tines) (2022) 54 As the pick once helped detangle my family’s hair, I long for this comb to help me (again) to groom the Land. Thinking back to Katherine McKittrick’s statement about “…social practices create landscapes and contribute to how we organize, build, and image our surroundings,” I want to connect and gesture thanks to the space and Land that held me and my family so carefully (xiv). To apply our family’s historical memory of care through an Afro-Caribbean knowledge framework, I believe, activates Land acknowledgement and fosters positivity and dedicated work through a non-extractive way. I had the privilege of a studio visit with IAI keynote speaker (2022) Cheryl L’Hirondelle, who reminded me that work requires practice and good practice isn’t one act. Extensive planning, training, and repetition must be conducted in order to become more familiar with thicc pick’s form in either by yoke or cradle. Almost like a rolling calf15 on a full-moon night, my body cannot leave its gaze away. Figure 3.1.4: practice of combing the Land with thicc pick, UBCO campus (2022) 15 The ‘rolling calf’ is a duppy who shapeshifts into a bull, calf, or goat with three hooves and one human leg while carrying a chain around its neck—"given by Satan to warn people” (Various 4). These duppy’s souls are people “too wicked for heaven or hell”. My dad really dislikes my interest in this duppy—reminding me that it is only a story to keep you home at night. 55 I’m aware that I am not the only creative that worked with the Afro pick form and symbolism. Hank Willis Thomas All Power to All People (2017) 28ft tall Afro pick steel sculpture is an example of this and remains as an influential piece to my practice. All Power to All People is a monument that includes the Black Power Movement to present-day activism located in the BLM which is evidently seen through the symbolic visualization of the fist on the handle. Thomas quotes “[the Afro pick] exists today as many things to different people; it is worn as adornment, a political emblem, and signature of collective identity. The Afro pick continues to develop itself as a testament to innovation. This piece serves to highlight ideas related to community, strength, perseverance, comradeship, and resistance to oppression” (Hank Willis Thomas, All Power to All People – Monument Lab). Like Thomas, Afro picks and combs are a relational point of interest for me. As an ontological symbol that informs essential care and health through relations of movement, touch, and narration (Glissant 28). This is interpreted by thicc pick’s form as an ambiguous body. A spectator that can be seen as both human, non-human, and a fragment of Land. When I carry and drag the comb across the Land, the performative act feels less like an object but as two beings performing an act of care. Where I see this work fit in the grand scheme in contemporary art in Canada, is maybe one of evidence that Afro-Indigenous knowledge can contribute to caretaker ship to Land through collaboration and art making. 3.2 Effigies: duppy-catcher 56 Figure 3.2.1: duppy-catcher b.2021-2022, Indigo placed in family heirloom decanter on top of Indigo dyed cotton fabric, Lake Country Art Gallery, Lake Country (2022) duppy-catcher b.2021-2022 (2022) (see. fig 3.2.1) holds the memory of making. A family heirloom crystal decanter cradles the Indigo that contributed the life to all these works in this section. The transparency of the decanter’s body becomes vital to show us the giving nature of Indigo. Its watery personality shifts in-between movements and transitions. A vessel, a wake—celebrating life, “…melancholia [,] and mourning” (Sharpe 19). Navigating relations through a “microspace” that includes various surfaces, landscapes, and stories. Revealing “hidden worlds of opacity” (Gomez-Barris 2-3). As Indigo and I became more familiar with each other, I recognized that this material being is truly bewitching for it calls to you from the pot. Their oleaginous form embodies the power to transfigure surfaces from a greenish-copper hue into a variety of blues. In my interpretation, Indigo is symbolic of cosmic transformation. Like duppy, they hold the capacity to shift between forms —duppy shifts from human, animal, and into smoke. Indigo shifts from 57 plant to powder, water to stain. When I place objects inside the vat, they re-emerge and are imbued with a resonance, a spiritual quality that was made by a ritualistic process based on familiarity. Figure 3.2.2: stringy hair bitch (detail of net), FINA Gallery, UBCO (2021) Following the procedures that I described in Chapter 2.2: “Materializing duppy,” I introduced cotton twine to this natural dye. I first scoured the cotton twine so that the Indigo could penetrate the pores of this cellulose fibre, which resulted in an even distribution of dye. Scouring is a deep-cleaning process which rids of oils, waxes, and grime collected on material during the manufacturing process. Once dipped, emerged, and materialized, I knotted the cotton twine in the style of a tossed hammock. In the UBCO MFA exhibition Treading Lightly (2021) (see. fig.3.2.2), the woven Indigo netting extends outwards and connects to the wall by beeswax pins for stability. 58 During the early stages of conceptualizing thicc pick, the process triggered me to question: how do I relate more to the non/beings around me? Reflecting on Stuart Hall’s “fixed” and “unfixed” positionings found in essentialist discourse, a contention of two "…vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture” (226), I began to see the irony of utilizing a drawing donkey16. I recognized how its existence is framed around human use which evoked empathy within me because of the similar narratives and discourses between mule and mulatta. A racist stereotype to frame mixed-race folks one-dimensionally through the characteristics of mules as discussed earlier through Ralina L. Joseph. Inspired by Glissant’s chapter “The Relative and Chaos” (chaos-monde), I sought to reconfigure the drawing donkey form to one which seeks to maneuver away from “hardened spatial binaries" (McKittrick xv). Qualities based on turbulence, independence, transformation, and strangeness. 16 A drawing donkey is a standard piece of equipment used in 2-Dimensional art making, specifically with still life or nude portraiture. Its name reflects the artist's posture when sitting upright on the structure. This posture allows the artist to draw without the hassle of maintaining the position of the drawing board. 59 Figure 3.2. 3: stringy hair bitch, Indigo net knotted with seven pointed stars on black walnut wood, wenge wood and synthetic hair, FINA Gallery, UBCO (2021) Many Black artists explore the visible and invisible nuances hair holds to identity, culture, race, and class. The title stringy hair bitch (2021-2022) (see. fig.3.2.4) addresses the author, the I, to points of contention on both difference and similarity through abject qualities—hair. “I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself” (Kristeva 3). By incorporating my hair as an essential material in the sculpture—from weaves to wefts—, I believe it informs the making as personal and confrontational to ideological conflicts regarding the Black mixed-race woman’s body. Addressing the paradoxes within Black being while navigating the mire of colonial attempts to essentialize me. I am inspired by how American artist David Hammons presents hair as 60 in/visibly restless and un/tamable in his works Untitled (1992)17 and Rock Head series (1998-2005)18, where he fashions various human head-sized stones and wires with hair collected from Black barbershops (Russeth). The artworks seem anonymous to non-Black viewers, but for me, they are intimately connected. They “summon an uncanny sensation of the strangeness that often lies just below the surface of the familiar” (“David Hammons: Untitled”). From this perspective, I understand Untitled and Rock Head as counterparts to stringy hair bitch— “faceless” sculptures that assert an Oppositional Gaze because the work refuses to be anything but what it is. “Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality” (hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze” 116). This is the sort of power hair embodies. Hair also sheds. stringy hair bitch is constantly shedding for its caramel tresses drag along the floor. When spectators look downward, they see a trail of loose ends left behind. A sensation I would compare to whenever my siblings and I shared a sofa. Though some people think of hair as decay, I see hair as life. When I bestowed stringy hair bitch the hair I once wore on my head; it gave the sculpture life. In the same sensibility, you cannot ignore the hair that embellishes La Ciguapa’s entire body or Rock Head’s fading hairline. In this essence, hair, as a material, asserts presence through its ephemerality. Hair as material also complicates transformation because hair is eternally connected to our corporeal forms—Black and brown bodies. Hair becomes problematized because not all hair is the same. Maybe then, the title stringy hair bitch fits well. 17 You can view images of Untitled (1992) at the Whitney Museum of American Art website: https://whitney.org/collection/works/8275 18 You can view images of Rock Head series (1998-2005) at the Museum of Modern Art website: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/102835 61 Amidst all the knots, curls, and coils, stringy hair bitch crudely attempts to re-sculpt a woman’s hindlegs into a Jamaican Mongoose. The form of the sculpture foreshadows body posture. Having this piece elongated—outstretched—alludes to a motion of transformation. Hair under the belly affirms this act which I think defies those to sit on top of her. Figure 3.2. 4: stringy hair bitch (installation), Indigo net knotted, beeswax on black walnut wood, wenge wood and synthetic hair, Plastic Grass, Lake Country Art Gallery, (2022) Firelei Báez shares: The freedom that I offer in each painting is in the mutable body. In having bodies in constant transition, it leaves it open for the viewer to shift ideas of power. In that process, you shift the world around you. (Mehdaoui 00:32-00:55 minutes) As Báez connects La Ciguapa to the environment through hair and plant life, I look to the Land to connect to duppy. The gathering of abandoned objects left on the Land is one method of 62 such connection—duppy is one who is dead but also returned life, and the gathering and repurposing of objects evokes this same transformation. Figure 3.2.5: a serious message of boundaries, wooden stakes, staples, bottle caps, and Indigo suspended by tear drop wire, Lake Country Art Gallery, (2022) Wumkes quotes Barrett who states that “vital force[s] manifests itself in all aspects of life. It may manifest itself in humans and beasts and also in things such as stones, trees, herbs, and the elements” (qtd. In 20). I apply this perception of vital energy to all found and collected single use objects like bottle caps and stakes, which I combined through repetitive gestures. Hammering a nail to each bottle cap on the stake and the consistent compression of my palm to ensure a firm overlap of staples onto the stake surface itself, is an artistic process steeped in 63 patience and dedication. The actions applied here are one of direct contact. The nails and staples pierce the wooden stakes and continue to evoke penetration through the spear like end of the stake itself. In Figure 3.2.5, two mounds of the saved wenge wood saw dust builds underneath the suspended works. This implies a marked territory. The stakes are “placed” but are amidst transition because the tear-drop wire insinuates movement. A “falling” perhaps. Figure 3.2.6: a serious message of boundaries, wooden stakes, staples, bottle caps, and Indigo suspended by tear drop wire, Lake Country Art Gallery, (2022) Again, reflecting how forbidden relations between duppy and Obeah arose from resistance, the practice of Afro-Religions, divination, and magic, and the act of dipping the stake into the Indigo vat itself, feels charged. As I nail the caps onto the stake, this “charged” feeling continues to emanate outwards as I read the proverbs on the inside of the Grace’s Island Soda ginger beer bottle caps. The impression I receive during these acts of dipping and reading is one relative to personal incantations. It feels personal because they incite nostalgia for me. The 64 stirring of the stake in the vat is like stirring a pot filled with curry goat. The reading of proverbs is like a recipe written by a family member. Figure 3.2.7: a serious message of boundaries (bottle cap detail), wooden stakes, staples, bottle caps, and Indigo suspended by tear drop wire, Lake Country Art Gallery, (2022) 65 Figure 3.2.8: a serious message of boundaries (staple detail), wooden stakes, staples, bottle caps, and Indigo suspended by tear drop wire, Lake Country Art Gallery, (2022) Intimate and frequent interactions facilitated the close relationship I have with these artworks. They have always been with me—close by—either at home or the studio. I would greet them when entering the room and dance with them before continuing the rest of my day. Initially, I felt vulnerable in LCAG’s open gallery space concerning installation. Since I have an existing welcoming ritual for these works, it is imperative to facilitate that ceremony in the curation process. Since the works evoke close encounters with spectators, an open space positions them too exposed. The desire to create an enclosed space was a part of this rationale. Through this intent, folks would have to enter and journey upwards—passing a serious message of boundaries and duppy-catcher b.2021-2022—and onwards towards thicc pick (see. fig.3.2.9). This maneuvering incites those visiting the space to approach and acknowledge through gaze and then, when ready, look away and proceed backwards, passing the artworks once again. What is important to note is that the gallery’s exit points are on the left and right-hand sides. Thinking 66 about body placement, visitors will have to turn sideways to leave. To turn often evokes a shoulder glance to the space, which I interpret as a “goodbye.” In this sense, the artworks collaboratively prompt activation within the space by “carv[ing] a direct path not necessarily to the dead but to the living” (Huber 18). Figure 3.2.9: Installation shot, (left) a serious message of boundaries, (center) thicc pick, (right) duppy-catcher b.2021-2022, install, Lake Country Art Gallery, (2022) 67 Chapter 4: Closing remarks I am a future ghost. I am getting ready for my haunting. (Tuck and Ree 648) Throughout Oleaginous duppy: alternate paths of connection through immaterial to material making, I shared my journey as an MFA Visual Arts Candidate at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus—located on the unceded territories of the Syilx (Okanagan) People, who continue to assert Indigenous title and presence while continued colonial oppression and extractive processes are exerted throughout their Lands. This support paper focuses on the philosophical underpinning of my artistic process and details why diasporic conversations are needed. duppy, a Caribbean ontological folk-being, was transmitted to me through my father with extreme wariness. While acknowledging that unfamiliar spectres have always been a part of my life, I dedicated my artistic research and practice to better understanding my relations to duppy as an act to rightfully acknowledge their history, counter cultural erasure and reclaim presence. Through this process, I discover alternate ways of expressing presence while addressing the complexities of Black identity within a Canadian context—a protective oleaginous veil of the “afterlife.” In Chapter 1, I cite Caribbean philosophers Stuart Hall and Édouard Glissant, who connect how relations are embedded with the Other—a relational duality linked to duppy’s cosmology. Glissant states that “Relation informs not simply what is relayed but also the relative and related,” therefore presenting my connection to duppy not simply as familial but connected throughout the Lands in which they live(d) (27). I address how constructing relations with my surrounding space is integral to connecting with the duppy. Acknowledging colonial 68 dispossession is deeply ingrained throughout the Land, I look to Hall, who recognizes these relations. A continued fate of expropriation by imposing a “dominate discourse” of controlled representation (225)—the Other. I reference Charmaine A. Nelson to illustrate how tactics of controlled representation perpetuate in Canadian visual culture. I begin to see how creative works by Dionne Brand and Erna Brodber subvert this narrative of colonial control by refusing colonial rhetoric by focusing on the Afro-Caribbean experience. I’ve identified how duppy is an enigmatic figure who traverses between social boundaries in pursuit of “yearning for alternate space(s)” outside of cultural dichotomies (Missouri 4). Édouard Glissant encourages this behaviour in his chapter “The Relative and Chaos” by embracing Chaos relations (chaos-monde). One can find artistic, poetic freedom with relations by renouncing linearity, which is subject to “…endless transformations” to potential creative outcomes (Glissant 137). I explore these transformations in duppy’s transmutable body and connect how colonial relations shaped my own as a Black mixed-race woman in Canada. American academic Ralina L. Joseph expands this shaping through the trope “tragic mulatta”. Through this understanding, a confrontation with essentialist notions presents “Blackness” within the Afro-diaspora as one-dimensional—a “hardened spatial binar[y]” that is seemingly immovable (McKittrick xv). To counter these notions, I assert that the many geographies that hold Afro-diasporic people also shape their identities uniquely. “far from being eternally fixed in some essentialist past” (Hall 225). Geographic experiences encapsulate the unique contours within the “overlap[ping] subjectivities, imaginations, and stories” that interconnect within Afro-diasporic livelihoods (xiii). 69 In keeping with the theme of liminality, I re-examine duppy’s transformative characteristics to address these questions since they allow creative freedom and agency. Though they are “shaped” by colonial violence, their mannerisms seek to escape. Dominican artist Firelei Báez also explores this narrative with the Dominican folk figure La Ciguapa. Báez finds agency and freedom by combining the Land with La Ciguapa form. A chimeral being blending with the landscape. Inspired by Montré Aza Missouri’s “Black Magic Woman” archetype who seeks “renewed self-possession,” I moult my own body with the Jamaican Mongoose—an animal whose relations are tethered to the shapeshifter, duppy. These theoretical research avenues inform my methodological art studio practice through relational sensibility. Recognizing that duppy not only communicates to me through story and myth but also through inherited food and grooming practices taught by loved ones. Christina Sharpe locates creative modes of practice and process within the realm of “Black non/being” through the concept of “wake work.” This method leans into the paradox and impossibility of resolving the histories located to Black consciousness (Sharpe 14). I transitioned away from drawing into sculptural making and performance. Continuing to engage in ways immaterial relations can materialize within space. Placing my body back onto the Land opened my understanding of both immaterial and material experiences. The UBCO Indigenous Art Intensive and Macarena Gomez-Barris shared the interconnected relational capacities found between being, non/being, and Land. Inspired, I sought ways of giving thanks to the Land through a Caribbean sensibility—combing. 70 Further, continuing to materialize immaterial relations, the process of Indigo dyeing mimicked similar gestures to Caribbean cooking practices. The Indigo process is one “placed” in the kitchen where many hands contribute to its making. Working with an organic Indigo vat felt replicated and fostered relations between the plant and I throughout the creative process. Old and new memories emerged—evoking duppy through an oleaginous frequency. This is an heirloom. An heirloom can be thought of as an object, a relic, a conjure19, or a moment in time preserved by memory. A precious compilation of stories and moments—a eulogy of sorts—planted and protected within the spectre, duppy—a being whose survival is not just based on its obscurity but is handed down. I present this support paper as an heirloom for myself—a future ghost who is thankful to the Black and Indigenous artists, scholars, and activists who gifted various Knowledges that I hope one day, I contribute to. I also bestow this heirloom to the reader—a welcoming, a responsibility to acknowledge, share, and relationally inspire each other. As someone who hates endings because I firmly believe that endings are not “the end”—for they are also beginnings—I want to remark that my art practice does not end here. Here is “placed”—forever in memory and the Land. The artworks birthed from this study will remain and then erode, decompose, and be scattered back into the Land. These works will come back as something ‘Other’ in a new ashy form. I am excited to see these changes through a new set of 19 I am referring to the mystical essence when experiencing shared knowledge by oral transmission. 71 eyes, like duppy. Emerging from soil and leaking out of bark and dissipating into a fog. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Visual Arts
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Willard, Tania
Oleaginous duppy : alternate paths of connection through immaterial to material making
Text