Carénage

Violent Island Girl

Textiles and works on paper produced in a loneliness factory, nurtured by radical feminist art spaces and collectives. The Violent Island Girl works …

Textiles and works on paper produced in a loneliness factory, nurtured by radical feminist art spaces and collectives. The Violent Island Girl works are an examination of institutional care, familial neglect and the corrupted dynamics of motherhood and sisterhood in cases of structural violence and intimate partner terrorism.

iFlora

iFlora, 2025 Latex, silicone, iPod with originally recorded mp3s, cover art, poem.

When the Apple iPod Nano 3rd Gen. was released in 2007, I enrolled at The University of the West Indies, where my mum had graduated about 25 years earlier.

Sometime last year, I’d looked for my mother’s name in my phone and found my birth certificate as well as dozens of photos of flowers; her name is a floral one. I painted those flowers, recorded myself singing the same song 50 times, and added album art & unique titles to those mp3s. You can scroll through the iPod’s Cover Flow feature to read a tricky memory uncovered by this exercise.

In a 2024 artwork which offers up orange paper cutouts of my hands as thoughts about feminicide, I reference the Marigold brand washing-up gloves that feature in an anecdote about Lady Di. These are reiterated with this iPod’s silicone & latex case.

The exact iPod that I had at that time is now a part of the tender, vibrant little collection of about 80 unique artist books commissioned by The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). These works are shown as part of the exhibition For Real For Real, hosted by daadgalerie in Berlin.

Cover Art