Portals are doorways that transport us from one place to another. From one state of being to an entirely different perspective. I think of portals as windows of opportunity: What kind of world do you want to journey to? What would it be like to embody the changes that you want to see in the world?
Earlier this year, the National Museum of Wales shared an open call for a commission to re-frame the colonial legacy of Thomas Picton. Two commissions were awarded, one to me and the other to Laku Neg, a Wales-based collective of Trinidadian artists. The work that I proposed was inspired by this idea of portals. I want to look at the ripple effects of the trauma experienced under Picton’s regime in Trinidad & Tobago. What would it be like, to venture into a portal, to a world in which the shared trauma of our colonial past is acknowledged and addressed, rather than dismissed and sanitized for the sake of continuity? What would it feel like to work on healing this trauma together? So many things, including our education system have barely changed. Our post-colonial world bares too much resemblance to what came before. What would it feel like to journey to a place where we make decisions and engage with people from a place of deep connection to each other? What kind of world do we want to create for our future selves?
This Portal is an interdisciplinary project that invites Black Trinidadians to participate in a healing offering that includes a series of tattoos and conversations around their connection to the land. Each of the eight tattoos will be a “portal” that frames a landscape scene within. The tattoos will all vary slightly from one another and will be placed in the center of each person’s chest or back. My intention is to create a looped stop-motion animation using these tattoos, to create a series of portraits of the participants and to create a short film that documents the process of this piece. This work will be installed and exhibited in the National Museum of Wales and will become a part of their collection.