I am drawn to a way of working that often brings seemingly unrelated elements into the same space. How can we take a situation that contains angst and trauma and use a material voice that may at first seem unrelated to create a dialogue with that particular pressure?

Windward is a project that reinvents the Jamaican national seal. The original coat of arms employs iconography of colonial tropes and is centered on the motto, “Out of many, one people.” I wanted to borrow from this existing motto and remake it to read as “people” over “out of many, one” to prioritize the investment in people instead of in an idealized harmony. This projection of a false sense of harmony is an example of how pressure is not always obvious—it can take on the forms of symbols and ideas that we take for granted but that are actually helping reinforce certain oppressive systems.

Materially, I use something as simple as shoelaces to call attention to movement, fragility, and possible power of collected discourse. I also use the image of a hand grabbing a horn—a composite of the “power to the people” fist and an abeng, an animal horn which was a symbol of the Maroons, Africans who formed free settlements in resistance to colonial power in Jamaica. Much of my research for this project centered on a woman named Nanny, often referred to as Queen Nanny or Nanny of the Windward Maroons, who led this resistance for a number of decades in the 1700s. The group is contentious in a way, because as much as the Maroons became a symbol of resistance, they later signed a treaty with the colonizers in which they agreed to return escaped slaves in exchange for certain autonomies. My interest in Nanny and the Maroons is founded on their representing not a perfect form of resistance, but a moment of potency built up from people coming together to collectively negotiate survival. The pressure amassed was one continually complicated with the potentials and frictions of collective unity.