Group Show: Quaternary at NuEdge Gallery
“Frida” a new collage to be featured in the Quaternary group exhibition in Holetown.
I’m pleased to announce that I will be exhibiting work in Quaternary: Four Barbadian Female Artists, a group show opening July 2, 2016 at NuEdge Gallery in Limegrove. Curated by Natalie McGuire, the exhibition brings together new work from four Barbadian women artists—myself included—and offers a necessary shift in how contemporary visual art is being shaped and shown on the island.
The show’s title, Quaternary, refers to the most recent period of physical shifts in the earth’s surface. Natalie’s framing draws on this concept to position the work as part of a new visual terrain, where each of us is offering something that moves beyond the expected or familiar. This is not simply a collection of pieces, but an active rethinking of form, subject, and image.
My contribution to the show includes a series of mixed media collages that continue my engagement with Black feminist portraiture. These works are not fixed in a single approach to representation. Instead, they push at the idea of what a portrait can hold. I am not interested in perfect outlines or formal likeness. I am interested in pressure points. I want to see what happens when fragments, gestures, and texture do more than illustrate. I want the work to press back.
New collages being prepped for framing at Frame & Art Co., Barbados.
Several pieces in the show incorporate found images. This is not about nostalgia. It is about context. These fragments offer new ways to consider how Black women have been seen, framed, and circulated. By placing them within the structure of my own collage practice—built on painted paper, mylar, and ink—I am asking what it means to hold those images, reshape them, and place them within new visual terms.
The work I’m showing resists clean lines. Color surges. Edges remain visible. Layers pull forward rather than recede. The body, as presented in these pieces, is not a vessel for resolution. It is a place of complexity. These are not abstract gestures for their own sake. Each mark, each torn edge, carries an intention.
While the pieces vary in scale, they share a common desire to speak outside of limitation. These portraits do not look back. They look directly at the viewer, or in some cases, past them. They invite a kind of looking that is less about reading and more about experiencing.
It is a pleasure to be exhibiting alongside artists who are also pushing their practices in new directions. Quaternary is not simply a group show. It feels like a moment where something else is possible. I am looking forward to the conversations this exhibition will spark and to the kind of engagement it might open up, both here in Barbados and beyond.
The show runs from July 2 through the end of the month at NuEdge Gallery in Holetown. All are welcome.
