OPENING REMARKS

Dr David Boxer, C.D.
Director Emeritus/ Cheif Curator
National Gallery of Jamaica

Laura,

Congratulations once again on your recent award of the silver Musgrave Medal. I won’t repeat the facts of the citation which I read at that memorable wind-swept ceremony; rather I want to take this opportunity to salute you and that core of essential honesty and integrity which permeates everything you do. .. to salute you too for that constant search for meaning in life and in art, and for your unabashed espousal of deeply felt spiritual and religious values.

I want to salute you as well for this exhibition and your celebration of the organic beauty of wood… cedar wood, cotton tree wood, mahogany…the spirits of these fallen giants are truly pleased with the use to which you have put their bones…. . And I salute those who aided you in this work, the students of the Edna Manley College and the youngsters of the Orange Hall District community. I salute Melinda Brown too for her assistance with the installation. Melinda has become something of a legend in the art community for boldly taking on the problems of downtown living. Inspired by Melinda’s daring Laura, by staging this exhibition here in this place, has symbolically joined with the new forces of regeneration that seem to be surfacing below Torrington Bridge.

Ladies and gentlemen, I saw the exhibition on Tuesday and I feel that the reliefs on the walls speak to architectural spaces and to interior design with such insistency that I hope Maurice and Stephen are taking note. When I first saw them my first question to Laura was whether she knew of the new thrust to create works for the Montego Bay Airport. She did…

But, Maurice, Stephen, in the restructuring and refurbishing of Downtown Kingston which must be accelerated, it is artists like Laura and Melinda with their devoted communal spirit that must join forces with our architects and city planners and with the citizens of communities like Southside to create a vibrant, living, aesthetically exciting environment for us all to live in and to work in…

But beautiful and as ingenious as they are Laura, I have not come here to speak of your panels; nor of architecture and Kingston’s restoration. I really want to speak of the extraordinary canoe in the centre of the gallery…

When I saw the “Canoe” on Tuesday I was immediately catapulted back in time to that intense period from August 2003 to January of 2004 when I was embroiled in the creation of my PASSAGE: A CHORUS OF SOULS installation for Lowery Sims’s CURATORS EYE exhibition at the National Gallery. You remember that period Laura, you were one of the artists Dr. Sims selected and you were involved in creating your own memorable installation, the serenely beautiful Golden Torso of Christ with its streaming bed of blood red roses….

Laura you were very much in my mind during those months/weeks/days/ hours… this was the period in the aftermath of the unveiling of your Redemption Song sculpture when certain elements of the society were reacting negatively ---and vehemently so--- to your magnificent prayer in bronze as I termed it then.

One aspect of the attacks I found particularly insidious and that was the questioning of your legitimacy in authoring such a piece; of questioning our having a light skinned Jamaican creating a sculptural tribute to the process of emancipation and the attainment of Freedom for our ancestors. It didn’t matter that you had won a BLIND competition, meaning that the entries were anonymous, which as a Jamaican you were totally within your right to enter. “Once the judges and organizers recognized that the winner was fair skinned, she should have been disqualified” …so ran the incredulous argument. The same coterie of “racial purists” then extended their assault with vicious attacks on Edna Manley and particularly her two icons of the Nationalist movement…Negro Aroused and the statue of Paul Bogle.

This question of racial correctness, of racial authority and legitimacy weighed heavily on me and clearly entered the complex dialectical structures of my own work The Chorus of Souls. I remember thinking then, and recording in my notebooks “I wonder where they draw the line? Surely if Cidella Booker had even as little as 1% of Caucasian blood… then Bob Marley presumed to be a mulatto, would tip to the white side of the racial scale. He would be whiter than black. Would Carolyn Cooper have HIS Redemption song expunged from the annals of Reggae History…?”

Ladies and Gentlemen, I speak at length about this aspect of my installation for obvious reasons…Laura’s principal work in this exhibition I believe has been spawned by much the same concerns. I used ibeji soul figures from Africa to diagram my ancestral slave-ship; Laura uses miniature replicas of her now famous monument, a work which I have always viewed as a contemporary, new world counterpart to the traditional Dogon primordial/ ancestral couple which is usually presented seated on an imago mundi stool.

In the Canoe which she titles “Their Spirits Gone before them” Laura boldly peoples her slave-ship canoe of history with replicas of her once beleaguered monument. She has responded to her critics I feel magisterially and with imaginative insight with a pair of conceits (the other is the sea of sugar cane stalks) conceits that hopefully will not be beyond the understanding of her critics, conceits that will emancipate their minds as they recognize how in one fell swoop she has reclaimed her own and her monument’s history. By filling the canoe with a slave-ship full of her contemporary figures she has compressed time and brought the past forcibly into the present and directed her monuments future…

Laura I end with words that guided my own installation and which I placed at the entrances to its various episodes…. Lines of the man who exploited poetic ambiguity as no other poet could. T.S. Eliot….

Time present and Time past
Are both perhaps present in Time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Thank you.