An outline of my three artworks in Pressure:

Sleepwalkers (2009–17), a large narrative, spanned a period of eight years in the making. It further explores the concept of Full Moon Madness—that our limited conditioning puts us to sleep, and we long to awaken to our authentic selves and fulfill our potential. In Sleepwalkers, moonlight illuminates the honeymoon party and the dark, eerie landscape. The characters are ever‑fearful of zombification and the loss of their deluded selves. They are conditioned to survive. Literary inspirations for Sleepwalkers are Charlotte Brontë’s bleak Gothic novel Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’s haunting supernatural prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff. My use of paint is itself sculptural in quality and symbolizes the unrelenting buildup of the psychological and emotional weight of the past and its burdened descendants. Moonlight only fleetingly illuminates the darkness of this permanent night.

It Must Be a Duppy or a Gunman (1998), titled with a borrowed, well-known lyric, was motivated by a visit to my Black great-grandmother’s grave in a dilapidated graveyard, and by a dead gunman I envisaged after hearing the spray of bullets on that same day. Thinking about the lack of Love in memoriam, the quickness with which Death can come and its inevitability, I decided to marry the two themes. Duppy is also my first known painting to utilize the color “black” mixed from a variety of blue, red, and yellow paints.

Madwoman in the Back Room (2008), is a portrayal of Jane Brontë’s Bertha from my 2008 series Full Moon Madness. In 1834 Antoinette Cosway, or Bertha, was a White creole outcast incapable of belonging to the Europe of her ancestors or to Jamaica, her birthplace. She is a “white cockroach” to the Blacks who hate her. Englishman Edward Rochester weds Bertha and refashions her into a raving madwoman on their honeymoon. Back in England, Rochester locks her away in his attic. Full of terror, rage, and anguish, Bertha sets fire to her husband’s estate, killing herself and maiming him. In this work, Bertha has become completely unhinged, exposing herself as a deranged exile who has lost touch with her authentic self. Shame. Guilt. Rage. Grief. Loss. Suffering. On the surface, Bertha can fit neatly into a confluence of themes that form the bedrock of Caribbean social, political, and cultural society and institutions. But Bertha cannot simply be reduced to a perpetrator of atrocities against the enslaved, to solely a woman of privilege or to predictable feminine stereotypes. Bertha is also a victim of an oppressive patriarchal society.

The complete overview of Roberta Stoddart’s featured work can be found in the Kingston Biennial 2022: Pressure Catalogue, which is available for sale in the NGJ Gift Shop.