Coming Inside: Moving into Making Still Life Collages
Still Life: Afternoon Tea (No. 2)
I didn’t set out to make still lifes. For the past couple of years, my work has been rooted in the landscape: the imagined, internal, emotional, and remembered landscapes of my Caribbean life, and the ones I created to hold them. But lately, I’ve found myself wanting to come inside.
These collages, small hand-drawn triptychs mounted on 11 x 15-inch rectangles of watercolor paper, are the result of that urge. They’re not final works, but rather studies that can potentially become larger works. They're also a way of thinking through the idea that the inside and the outside aren’t separate places in my world. The heavy, dangling leaves of the breadfruit tree cane nudge their way into the open kitchen window and the stretching stems of a daisy can breach the glass panes of double patio doors.
When I was a child in Barbados, my mother collected decorative plates and hung them on the walls of our apartment. They depicted dainty colonial interiors: teacups, checkered tablecloths, warm stoves. I stared at those plates often. First in awe of their delicate decoration. Later in deeper awareness of what they implied. That early fascination with interior space stayed with me, morphing into a love for Van Gogh’s sunflowers and the still lifes of Cezanne, Rousseau, and others. Of course, we tried to mimic these masters in my high school art classes, but I was rarely moved by the still lifes I created, so the impetus to make them in my expanded practice was not really there.
That change happened slowly. Maybe it was the comfort I’ve come to find in repetition, rewatching the same shows, returning to the same colors, layering and re-layering the same painted papers. Maybe it’s the low-grade anxiety that hums underneath everything these days and the need to make a space where I can rest. Maybe it’s my continued thinking around home, not as a fixed point, but as something that travels with me. Something I build and rebuild through form, color, and memory.
Each triptych is carefully structured. I sketch every panel beforehand, mapping where vines might trail in through a window, where flowers might bloom beside a sink. I think of these as domestic compositions, but they’re never sealed off. There are always windows. There are always doors left ajar. Leaves snake inside. Mangoes appear beside cut flowers. Tea is ready on the table just as we come in from outside, pulling in the wet mud and fresh oranges with us.
I make each one by hand using acrylics, wax pastels, markers, painted paper, and monoprints over the course of a few days. The scale is intimate, intentionally so. I’m not yet sure what these will become, if they’ll evolve into larger works or stay at this scale. For now, they feel like a place I can enter. A place where beauty and structure, routine and riot, domesticity and wilderness all sit in amicable conversation together.
And they are enough, for now.
