2009-2011
This piece was created during a trip to Guyana, my mother's country of origin. I created the ceramic objects (arranged in a wheel on the plinth) by gathering clay from the trenches that line the rice fields of our family's rice farm. I shaped the clay, burnished it, and pit-fired it on site. I shot the video that is projected on the embroidered scrim during a trip to where the river that runs by our family farm meets the atlantic ocean. As the tide came it, the water erased the rippled marks that it had made when the tide went out earlier in the day. The video takes this image and repeats in in reversal, which then loops, re-creating the endless marking and erasure of the water on the land.
During the making of this piece, my grandmother passed away in the US. My family returned her body to Guyana, and she was interred on the family farm next to my grandfather, who had passed 26 years earlier (the same year that I was born). The piece became a sort of remembrance of her, as well as a meditation on the land and the water, both elemental presences in a place that is both "home" to my family, yet foreign.