Annalee Davis: The Rooted Series, The Wild Plants Series and other drawings on Plantation Ledger Pages, Suites of drawings and paintings (2015). Photo credit – Mark King.
Saccharum officinarum and Queen-Anne’s Lace on LedgerPages, 2014.
All the other illustrations are from the Rooted Series on Ledger Pages.
About:
This series of drawings functions as graphic interventions into 1970s plantation ledger pages, the substrate designed to log activity which took place on the plantation. Data entered into ledger pages was primarily economic including registering wages, field activity and rent rolls as well as measuring rainfall and the signing out of agricultural implements to plantation labourers.
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These drawings counter the daily logging of economic activity on the plantation by inscribing other images that offer alternate ways of reading the site. This includes drawings of wild plants seen growing in former sugar cane fields; images of roots, people, text from 19th century wills, lace etc; complicating the single story written in these plantation ledger pages.
Visual artist Annalee Davis works around issues of post-plantation economies by engaging with the landscape of Barbados where she lives. Working at the intersection of biography and history, she has been making and showing her work regionally and internationally since the early nineties. She was in residence at Delfina Foundation, London, UK in August 2016 to produce a new work commissioned by the curatorial duo Cooking Sections. The commission, (bush) Tea Services was exhibited as part of their long-term research project titled ‘Empire Remains Shop’, which explores the infrastructure and cultural imaginaries established within the British Empire.
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In 2011, Annalee founded The Fresh Milk Art Platform, a socially engaged non-profit organization and micro-artist residency programme on a modern dairy farm, which historically operated as a sugarcane plantation in the 1660s. The farm also offers a critical context for her practice, engaging with the residue of the Caribbean plantation through drawings, installations, video, objects and activism.
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In her capacity as director of Fresh Milk, she has co-managed the annual regional residency programme Caribbean Linked since 2012, and co-founded the independent Tilting Axis Conference in February 2015. Tilting Axis attempts to breach the geopolitical gap between Caribbean territories and reconnect them through alternative forms of critical Caribbeanness and visual arts.
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Annalee received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Rutgers University in New Jersey. She is a part-time tutor in the BFA programme at Barbados Community College, is on the board of ARC Magazine and was recently appointed as the Caribbean arts manager for the British Council.(text website artist)