Chapter 25 - Reading the Colonial Archive through Joscelyn Gardner’s Creole Portraits I–III

Summary

The work of contemporary Barbadian-Canadian artist Joscelyn Gardner engages extensively with the Caribbean historical archive as it manifests in the form of published books, museum collections, paintings, and unpublished plantation journals. In her lithographs as well as her multi-media installations, Gardner refers to a whole range of early Caribbean sources in the form of written or visual quotations, most importantly Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705) and the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood. Gardner’s three series of lithographic prints, Creole Portraits, combine detailed drawing and handwriting, challenging the visual and written languages of eighteenth-century colonial culture in the Caribbean. For Gardner, lithography as practice – with its close connection to the history of the book – not only opens the colonial ‘book’ to new readings from the perspective of a contemporary Caribbean artist, but it also addresses the question of what constitutes a book more generally in the context of current art practice in the region.