Bathed in Sacred Fire!
October 1st, 2021 to March 20th, 2022We are pleased to present Sour Grass' first multi-year collaboration with a European cultural institution. Over the next three years, Sour Grass will curate an annual exhibition with Kunstinstituut Melly kicking off with a solo exhibition of Trinidad and Tobago-based Jamaican artist Jasmine Thomas-Girvan in October 2021.
This multi-year collaboration puts forward two programmes (i) “Gatherings” which proposes aspirational qualities of being, assembly, and exchange, and (ii) “Passages” which will offer deeper reflections and exchanges within public fora and invitational sessions.⠀
Jasmine Thomas-Girvan casts lyrical bronze and silver figures with dexterity and treats glass and metals as if these were delicate lines in an automatic drawing. These poetic assemblages often include anthropomorphised characters and depict or readily incorporate natural materials from Caribbean landscapes, including seeds and gourds, palm fronds and feathers, and detritus-turned-treasure washed up from the warming Atlantic. Primarily figurative, always intricate, her work is imbued with magical realism, tale-telling when the quotidian and the supernatural realms collide. While it considers positive knowledge, it suspends the earthly and mundane to imagine histories untold. Her works have reckoned with passages and transitions felt through joy, loss, learning and unknowing, at once based on personal and broader socio-political experiences.
Including newly commissioned work, and recent sculptures, Thomas-Girvan’s solo exhibition at Kunstinstituut Melly will be her first in Europe. Thomas-Girvan’s command of craft and her experimentation with techniques intersects with her interest in folklore and myth, as much as contested histories, orality and literature. Her inspirations range from Carnival processions and Junkanoo dances to the literary work of Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior and the multitudinous stories of Anansi (meaning spider in the Akan language), a trickster archetype brought from West Africa to the Caribbean through oral histories by enslaved people, which figures in mythologies, traditions, rites of passage and rituals.
Thomas-Girvan's home territories move between Trinidad and Tobago in the south and Jamaica in the north of the region, both part of an archipelago in the belly of the Americas, colonised by the Spanish, Dutch, French and British Empires. Through the lenses of migration, the history of enslavement and extractivist economies– different struggles, belief systems, and economies are observed, criticised and re-imagined in her oeuvre.
“Through the lenses of migration, the history of enslavement and extractivist economies– different struggles, belief systems, and economies are observed, criticised and re-imagined in her oeuvre.”
Having studied textile and jewellery design in New York, she began her artistic trajectory with applied arts. Over the years, the artist increasingly shifted her practice from jewellery to sculpture. Thomas-Girvan has always explored Caribbean cultural histories, this focus becoming more evident as the dimensions of her work grew to imagine, conceptualise and spatialise more textured and intricate narratives.
“Thomas-Girvan’s command of craft and her experimentation with techniques intersects with her interest in folklore and myth, as much as contested histories, orality and literature.”
In her sculpture ‘Real Princess’ (2016), she addresses the complexities and nuances of the transatlantic slave trade and African diasporas; in ‘Rooted’, of the same year, an exploration of landscape and cartography also allude to allegory and migratory patterns, common to the mass exoduses from post-independent Anglophone countries. These are among the artworks selected for the exhibition.
Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, new work is presented within the framework of Kunstinstituut Melly’s Solo Duets program, and as part of Gatherings and Passages, a multi-year collaboration with the Barbados-based curatorial agency Sour Grass that aims to foster a more comprehensive understanding of Caribbean contemporary art and culture. Gatherings and Passages is also an opportunity to raise awareness about colonial histories, and experiences of post-colonialism and decolonisation.
