I am an artist, not just by profession, but by my very existence.

-Desanna Watson

Retention of A Colonial Past, 2018, Mixed Media on Canvas

Retention of A Colonial Past, 2018, is a 75feet by 8 feet long mixed media painting.

As people traverse daily on their various quests of life, whether it be work, school or leisure, there is a level of subconscious passiveness towards the spaces we traverse through. This painting features the city of Kingston, a city designed by and build for white elites to be a residential area. Often the history of spaces dictate how we can and cannot navigate our lives. Such imposition can easy go unrecognized unless one takes the time to deeply analyze a space. The piece is an ongoing palimpsest of Kingston that seeks to highlight the inequalities in society and how it plays out in the city of Kingston from the early eighteenth century to the twenty-first century.

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Woman and Ownership: Her Stories,2021, Mixed Media on Canvas

Women And Ownership: Her Stories, 2021, mixed media

This body of work was birthed out of my desire to purchase property and my experiences with the process. I recognized that asking male friends to enquire about properties or to accompany me to meet sellers, were more fruitful than embarking on the journey by myself. Imagine my surprise when I read an article in March 2020, entitled NHT Loans Favour young, Women, published by the National Gleaner Company.” This stirred my plan for this body of work, which was to narrate my response to this article, questioning its details and allowing myself to freely respond through a journaling process on canvas. The article stated that the largest increase in home owners were women ages 18-35 over the last four years(2016-2020). That is most interesting, I thought. I began asking myself a series of questions, which included: “In what ways are women winning?” “What class of women are winning?” “What age group of women are winning?” and “What has caused this increase in the desire of young women to own land and property?” Along the journey of finding answers to my questions, I found myself fascinated with contractual agreements which are both a symbol of strong, legal, proof of the acquisition of property and a symbol of negotiation. Property, refers to something that is owned and is used in whatever way deemed suitable by the owner. As I repeated that definition in my mind, I recognized that it sounded so familiar, it looked so familiar. I have read this through the narratives of history, where women were first properties to their fathers and kinsmen, then to their husbands and eventually to their slave owners. I am seeing this today as some despicable men butcher women simply because they opted to no longer be in relationships with them. I am constantly feeling the concept of being seen as property today, in 2021 as I have conversations with men and feel fear whenever I have to express my lack of interest in them. Who negotiated the terms of these contracts that disturb my existence as a woman daily ? And who signed it?

This body of work is a journal of women’s stories in Jamaica and across the world. The conclude of the work is that the quest to own land is connected to a deeper desire to own self in a world that has negotiated and agreed that we are properties to someone or something. These are their stories, well at least a few. My hope for this work is that women will be encouraged to tell their own stories, own them and start to create other stories where they negotiate the terms and condition.

 

The Contractual Agreement (1 -4), 2021, Mixed Media on Paper

Endless, 2021, Mixed Media Installation

Beneath the Surface (series), 2021, Mixed Media on Canvas

“My life’s goal is to inspire”