Field Studies: The Launch of Yabisi Guada Coloring Books
I love the landscape of Barbados. Flat as it is, it’s inland gentle hills and sharp drop offs into the Atlantic Ocean on its east coast are some of my favorite places to explore on the several road trips I have taken with friends and family over the past several years.
So much of my art practice has been rooted in the visually stunning quality of this landscape that when Dr. Sonia Peter approached me in 2019 about collaborating on a duo of activity coloring books for adults and children featuring the rich biodiversity of Barbados, I was more than a little excited; I knew the field studies and research trips would be epic.
Sugar Apple on Moore Family Farm, Barbados. Photo: Llanor Alleyne.
I was not disappointing. Over the next several months, Dr. Peter and I travelled to several Bajan farms across the island, exploring gullies of towering breadfruit trees, rows of okra plants, goat-inhabited groves of papaya, sugar apple and guava trees, and near-sea outgrowths of fat porks in bloom. Along the way, I got a new mentor and friend in Dr. Peter, a passionate ethnobotanist and practicing qualified natural product chemist., who is also Executive Director of the Biocultural Education and Research Programme in Barbados.
For the next couple of years, life and a global pandemic got in the way, but Dr. Peter and I restarted the project in earnest in 2021, when my black and white collages of everything from passionfruit to dog dumplings began to take shape first as drawings then as Adobe Illustrator vectors with each aspect of each collage designed separately to create individually stems, fruits, leaves, etc., for the final collage.
In August 2022, the two coloring books titled, Yabisi Guada (Tree Garden), were launched at a reception in Barbados’ Queen’s Park. I was on a trip to the island as I took a break between day jobs, and was fortunate to attend in person and reconnect with Dr. Peter, whom I hadn’t seen for nearly two years.
Pictured above from left to right: Guava collage in progress, soursop cut out, passionfruit collage before gluing. Photos: Llanor Alleyne.
The aim of Yabisi Guada is to serve as a tool for education and awareness with emphasis on highlighting and identifying the fine details and features of these culturally significant indigenous plants, all of which have deep medicinal and wellness value for Bajans.
The impact of this collaboration on my art practice and my environmental awareness can not be overstated. Since working with Dr. Peter, I have taken on other collaborative research and academic projects that are having a global impact on how we see and engage with the natural world around us. My approach to art-making has also been positively altered as tackling the botanical drawings for Yabisi Guada saw my drawing abilities improve tenfold and imagination expanded beyond measure. It has been one of the most satisfying collaborations of my art career thus far.
