An Autopsy on Awakening
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In her solo exhibition ‘. . . there are always two deaths’ Tessa Whitehead speaks towards the landscape, violence, cycles of life and the inner workings of nature in conjunction with the sacred feminine. This writing takes us into her world of myth, magic, family trees, secrets and transformations.
“There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.”
Jean Rhys’ ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ (1966), the seminal feminist and anti-colonial text provides an anchor and way for us to look into personal scapes and spaces from a social gaze, rife with the vestiges of systemic racism born out of patriarchy. The contemporary Caribbean is one of the most politically fragmented regions for its size on earth; one with the strongest remaining colonial presence.
Fifty-plus years on, we are living in countries under the threat of the dark veil of what remains, and as we rise from this postcolonial malaise, several things come into sharp view. Firstly, we are full of paradox, birthed out of the conquest for discovery and the reinvention of modern-day slavery, and we occupy multiple centres, histories and ways of being. This can be seen as chaos from the outside, but from the inside, it operates tangentially and strategically as a way to heal and bear witness to loss and history.
This means that there is rarely a clear cut story, and personal and familial histories are disrupted, meandering and ever dense. Lineages and bloodlines crisscross under the legacy of these interruptions—pauses, shifts and disruptions—to show something inherently curious. As Caribbean people, we embody the weight of histories, and equally can draw from this pool of trauma and dynamism, ingesting, remediating and transforming our post-plantation legacies and space, to bring new life, narratives and blooms to our landscape and, most importantly, to our consciousness.
Bahamian-Jamaican interdisciplinary artist, Tessa Whitehead, opens this world through her paintings. She reveals vistas that are intimately personal and lyrically political, woven through fragile inter-generational lines binding together in a gestational sac: childhood, the exotic landscape, fables and women.
Her story, or what is known, begins in the 1920s and 1930s with her matrilineal great-grandparents—the Roses, hailing from Spaldings, a rural community in the heart of Jamaica, and the Davidsons from Kingston, which is where her line finds its Caribbean root. Surviving on subsistence farming with a robust barter system, the Rose family was able to work the land to provide sustenance through the farming of coffee and cane, in exchange for livestock.
In this bygone Caribbean, steeped in multiplicities, Whitehead's ancestors moved into the post-plantation industry, professionalising and studying the exhausted soil, becoming specialists and agronomists. The women took to the household, entrenched in the labour of domesticity, nurturing and care—the silent labour—to fulfil duties to children, spouses, community and the makings of home.
This aspirational struggle to make life better is one that was prevalent in most British colonial spaces and indeed, that middle-class struggle continues to this day in the independence era. It is worth noting that although Whitehead's grandparents were white or "white-passing" and no doubt had the privilege associated with this, the family owned land that was not connected to a working or functional plantation, which intersects the historical legacy of wealth and privilege in the Caribbean in ways we do not often get the chance to address.
The Rose family with six of the eight children photographed in Spaldings. Mr. Rose had one arm due to a sugar mill accident. Helen Millicent Rose, Whitehead’s grandmother, is not pictured as she was not born yet.
There is a widespread belief in Jamaica that the country has more churches per square mile than any other country. The Bahamas, in particular, would have something to say about this claim to righteous fame. The church and its broader mission as a weapon of colonisation has wielded tremendous power, transforming mores, codes, and social obligations to specifically affect gender roles globally. In the Caribbean, its patriarchal and dogmatic legacy is seductive as a tool of compliance and oppression, connected to the erasure of tangible and intangible heritage from enslaved African peoples who populated the Caribbean during the rise of the Empire and the plantation.
It is in this setting that the Davidson family finds its origin in the Caribbean within the Presbyterian church, established in Jamaica in the early 1800s by missionaries from Scotland. Leonard Davidson, Whitehead’s great-grandfather, ran a dry goods store in Kingston and came from a procession of ministers in the denomination which held firm very colonial moral codes regarding class, race and gender.
The Davidson Family: Leonard, Ruby and all three children including George Carol photographed in Kingston in 1931.
Whitehead’s patriarchal line is a story of exile. Her father’s family, European by descent, was displaced from Austria in the wake of the tragedy and despair of World War II. It is no surprise that much of the world changed due to the mass exodus from Europe and that the political alliances to defeat the Third Reich facilitated migratory patterns that landed them in the belly of the Americas, far away from a ruined and war-torn Europe.
Moving to The Bahamas in 1947 to create a new life and opportunities for their family was no easy option. Leaving behind relatives, siblings, few possessions and an emptied homeland to take up residence in the tropics, the “New World,” though alluring is still displacement. There was always a sense, by Whitehead, that what little was left behind by her grandparents was done so purposefully, to reiterate memories and to hearken back to a time before war ravaged their country.
For context, the 1940s was a time of great transformation across the archipelago and in The Bahamas, which was at that time a British Colony. From 1940-45 the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, served as governor of The Bahamas, following his abdication in 1936. The Duke’s appointment had a significant impact boosting the Bahamian tourism industry as a main attraction to those in Europe. This, no doubt, affected how the country was seen from the outside.
In 1942, the Burma Road riots took place in protest against the unequal treatment of Bahamian workers at the Windsor Airfield construction site, now the Lynden Pindling International Airport. This not so quiet revolution paved the way for Majority Rule as Black Bahamians stood in defence of the right to equal pay for equal work, regardless of colour or nationality. These volatile years were also folded into the beginning of “The Contract,” (1943-65) which was a social movement propelling more than 30,000 Bahamians to become agricultural workers across the US. Economically and socially, the migration of so many Bahamians as temporary workers in the United States reshaped the community, leaving its mark on postwar Bahamian society.
Leonard and Ruby Davidson, Tessa’s great-grandparents in Kingston in the early 1900s.
In 1956 Whitehead’s mother, Judy was born, and the family lived between The Bahamas and Jamaica, as her father worked at British American Insurance which had offices in both countries. In 1972, the political climate in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean was advancing radical socialist agendas with countries like Guyana, Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago—newly independent countries—struggling to carve out their paths of development throughout the Federation.
Michael Manley, the enigmatic and newly minted prime minister and a noted democratic socialist with love for communism and kinship with the Castro regime, supported radical philosophies which shook up the status quo and made the powers-that-be uncomfortable about the future of the country’s economy and stability. This, along with imposed tax regimes and anti-tourism propaganda led primarily by the US, made Jamaica an even more volatile space.
The United States openly disapproved of Castro's overtures in Jamaica and cut back aid and political ties to that country, which brought about major financial problems for Jamaica. The economy declined in the 1970s, leading to political instability and an upsurge in violence and emigration. This back and forth pattern of travel between Jamaica and The Bahamas ended when it was no longer economically feasible for the family to live in Jamaica, and they made their permanent move to The Bahamas in the late 1970s, a newly-independent country.
Thomas, her father, was born shortly after his parents moved from Austria in 1951. The family established horse and riding stables on Hog Island, more commonly known as Paradise Island. During their childhood, Thomas met Judy, who was a bit younger, while she was learning how to ride. They dated after university and later married. The rest, as we say, is history.
Excretions: The Wild Botanic
“Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.”
As a young child, Whitehead’s maternal grandparents lived near her family on New Providence, and eventually they all lived together in the same home. The stories they shared of Spaldings and Kingston created the context of her life and the foundation of her imagination. She and her two older sisters had a farm where they had horses, donkeys, goats, geese, chickens, ducks, rabbits and peacocks. The rhythm of her life was scheduled around the feedings and well-being of these creatures, and she continues to dream of this kind of care from childhood. Farm life left an indelible impression on her, as it was here that she learned how to care for the land and understand the broader ecosystem of life. There was a lot of time to escape into the land, to hide, to watch things grow, to see how rain and light fall on through brush and forests, and into the dirt. Though the eastern part of New Providence is not typically a lush space, Camperdown, where her family home is located, is a secluded sanctuary, offering up the tropics as a prism. One-degree of movement and the kaleidoscope opens up new meanderings, thoughts, nests, mounds and slits of light and green.
This grounding, along with the shared and remembered imaginative spaces in Jamaica, fueled and bred a more profound connection in Whitehead’s mind toward the importance of a woman’s space in nature. This grounded-ness through the matrilineal that was ever-present, strong, and loving, showed her how to overcome hardship, isolation and pain through caring. By cooking, planting, growing, weeding, peeling and creating moments to nurture others in their communities and the surrounding land/ground, her family’s makeup and openness offered a direct channel to the source of this innate and sacred power.
“An exceedingly meditative space, the “bush” also became a space of healing and learning as the density and breadth of green and darkness opened up moments of storytelling.”
An exceedingly meditative space, the “bush” also became a space of healing and learning as the density and breadth of green and darkness opened up moments of storytelling. This oral tradition is common within diasporas, and certainly in the Caribbean, the foundational knowledge bed of most families. Suppertime and dinner tables were alight with stories about voodoo, obeah, witches, magic, curses, house stonings and mythologies. These deepened a sense of mystery and intrigue, anchoring Whitehead’s imaginative space in a rich foundation where she undoubtedly continues to mine and extract.
Studies of the landscape.
The stories were cemented in her mind, and allowed her to form and ground her sense of the world; with a natural seepage from the mystic blending with reality. They would set the tone for how things were understood and would guide her mind’s ability to build the accompanying visuals to pair, transforming every experience. Indicators of evil, good and the broader spiritual dimensions blended effortlessly in the landscape, leaking rhizomes of deep connectivity and intertwinement, further informing her construction of self and womanhood.
It is in this genuinely liminal space, at the threshold of becoming, where Whitehead’s practice is located—as a site for the contestation of identity, a locus to confront suffering, erasure and the trickery of memory and nostalgia.
Whitehead's process starts in an innocuous manner, with looking. The gaze, which can be contentious and fraught with conversations around privilege, access and power, is diffused, as she often starts her oil paintings with and through photography, sketching and appreciating the subject. Her gaze, while active, peruses and does not stay at any one object, nor does it fixate itself with beauty or perfection. The gaze is meandering and a bit quixotic. It is not intention-filled, instead it is loose, rebellious and wayward.
Study of the landscape #2.
These images and sketches, while practical, form an index from which she continues to look, scour, critique and unpack. Whether it is collecting the more delicate details of a chain linked fence, the hem of a dress, the female body emerging from a body of water, her own body’s reflection as seen in a mirror, or a gate leading to nowhere, these scenarios are looked at in an embryonic and inquisitive manner. They are contemplated upon, and worried about, before the canvases are primed, colours chosen, and before Whitehead sets the intention of the spaces and memories that are about to be interrogated.
It all starts from that image or impression; then canvases are filled with dripping recollections and images caught in time, coated in childhood-remembered light, darkness, bilge and acidity. Upon encountering the drape of a dress, a nightmarish ghoul or a dark and ominous path, these uneasy moments and tense combinations of colours create equally alluring and foreboding scenarios, where one is simultaneously attracted and repelled. This is the power of Whitehead’s work, the matched measures that find symbiosis.
The compositions are so subjective that it is hard to not insert oneself into the river crossing in ‘Carolling: On the way in, on the way out’. As an observer, one might be on the river’s edge or in a congregation, but as a participant, we too are treading through this muck-filled psychedelic landscape that is simultaneously a dense and chaotic beauty. This trickery continues to expose the craftiness of her practice as one that engages certain kinds of everyday-ness or mundane-ness with elements of the supernatural and the phantasmagoric.
Tessa Whitehead. ‘Carolling: On the way in, on the way out’. Oil on canvas. 50’ x 62”. 2018. Work courtesy of the artist and image courtesy of Roland Rose.
“Magical Realism had, and continues to have, a major influence on the development of the aesthetic of contemporary Caribbean and Latin American Art, as it directly relates to the ambiguous in-between spaces where one has trouble identifying or belonging.”
Magical Realism, a term coined in 1925 by German art historian Franz Roh to describe the burgeoning art movement known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), is a device used time and time again in Whitehead’s oeuvre. Art drawing from this depicts ordinary subjects with a mysterious and detached manner. The subjects painted by magical realists were ordinary, but presented in a way that was far from commonplace.
Magical Realism became popular as a literary device in the 1940s by Latin American writers including Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges among others. Later on, Alejo Carpentier, Isabel Allende and Toni Morrison used it as a way to explore the natural, the metaphysical, reticence, phenomenon and hybridity; all fundamental modes of cultural expression in the Americas and postcolonial spaces.
Magical Realism had, and continues to have, a major influence on the development of the aesthetic of contemporary Caribbean and Latin American Art, as it directly relates to the ambiguous in-between spaces where one has trouble identifying or belonging. This phenomenon is a part of displacement, and connected to the uprooting and the loss synonymous with the Atlantic Slave Trade and the birth of the modern Caribbean as a formidable capitalist experiment. Whitehead's work, while drawing from precious familial oral traditions, is also automatically involved and in conversation with syncretic elements of the African diaspora, rich in storytelling and myth-making and/or myth perpetuating.
Postcolonial women artists Simone Leigh, Joscelyn Gardner, Candice Lin and Deborah Anzinger, continue to work temporally; with the past and the future to decolonise the power dynamics around labour, women and the landscape. They collectively examine agency within a gendered context in relation to nature and the historical bond women have to the land. Nature has an intrinsic role in the healing arts, and has drawn suspicion from patriarchal leadership beginning after the Middle Ages from the persecution of witches in Europe to the silencing and invisibility of bush medicine and spiritual practice connected to the land across the African diaspora.
Whitehead’s colours and aesthetic choices around the landscape are nuanced and answer this question of wildness, the unconsciously vibrating colours atypical of what one might find in a paradisaical or exoticised place. This element of turning paradise or the picturesque on its head evokes ownership of the Caribbean landscape, a space once burdened by slavery, colonisation and now by neocolonialism, with the continued co-opting of industries, finance, trade and security arrangements.
Dr. Krista Thompson’s seminal postcolonial text ‘An Eye for the Tropics’ (2006) “shows how the Caribbean’s growing tourism industry, from the 1880s, marketed and transformed the islands into a visual paradise, and their inhabitants into picturesque motifs. Hence both the visual and the cultural identity of the islands were redefined by capitalism.” This undoubtedly plays into Whitehead’s awareness of efficacy and of reinventing a landscape that resists this trope, a landscape reclaiming itself from loss and grief. Ancestral knowledge equips one with information to work against domineering and oppressive systems of control; in Whitehead’s hands, it is well sharp (and ready to cut you down).
In ‘Carolling: On the way in, on the way out’, sand, sun and sea are replaced by bodies traversing the bottom half of the painting, wading through dark waters filled with a glimmer of orange that fools the mind into thinking that release or surrender is forthcoming. In fact, this horizon comes without a sunset; instead these bodies and dark/black upper torsos, viewer included, are invited to wade through excrement and murky waters towards a horizon steeped with foliage—a hybridized gathering of ferns, mustard-stained splotches reminiscent of succulents and abstract greenery that fulfils no obligation of retreat or calm.
Waterfalls, blossoms and figures with slanted eyes meander in the background, moving further and further away as one succumbs to the fact that the only way out of this moment is through and into/beyond the horizon. The colour palette is deliberate, as it is linked to the resuscitation of life and of self through the mode of painting. Using painting and mark-making as a form of rescue of one’s self, Whitehead is also deploying painting and the anecdotes therein as a lifeline, a thread to her future self, giving room and breadth to open up the span of time in a way that links to her past, to the stories, songs, tricksters and legends.
The bodies are witnesses, in a stasis where they are not allowed the gratification of movement. Movement is imagined but never obtained. The name ‘Carolling: On the way in, on the way out’, references a congregation, imagined to be in a resounding chorus or silently taking in the surroundings which may also be connected to the spiritual, where bodies witness the landscape's eerie melodies. The refrain of Oya’s winds, and Oshun’s sweet-waters sanctify space and call for all to enter into this rich ecology. It is on this surface that history sojourns with the present to make amends, to heal and continue a legacy of reinvention. As Whitehead injects moments of surrender and awe into the landscape, the abstraction of energy reflects the urgency of “un-doing” aspects of her identity through art making. This un-doing is messy and continuously evolving.
In ‘I Have Too Many Teeth in My Mouth’ (2019), Whitehead paints a self-portrait and uses the opportunity to pull forth a nightmare for us to contemplate. The central and lone figure is bald and monster-like with a gaping mouth occupied by rows of teeth that are too long for it to close. The mouth recedes into an unfathomable, cavernous lava-coloured hole, the blood-like stain emitting a haunting. The border of the face is flattened out, surrounded by matte textures of green, blue, ochre and muddied dirty yellow. The pale orange skin evokes a grotesque and sickly tone, softened by two squinting eyes increasingly diminished as the right-hand embraces the heart across the frail width of the left side of the chest.
‘I Have Too Many Teeth in My Mouth’ is in direct conversation with the canon of Art History, moving from the shock and awe of Sergei Eisenstein's 1931 masterpiece film ‘The Battleship Potemkin’, to Francis Bacon’s 1953 iconic ‘Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X’, painted at the height of Bacon’s practice where he successfully re-interpreted a classic of the western canon of visual art.
These monstrous, gruesome works continue through first and second wave feminism with Louise Bourgeois, capitalising on softening trauma by drawing closer to it through a confessional methodology. Today, contemporary artists like Nan Goldin, Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle turn emotion on its head, bringing to light the dangers of gendered norms around what women’s art should be, and shining a light on the codes created and reinforced by western patriarchy.
Whitehead, too, confronts the uncomfortable and the shameful, the sacred and the profane in her works, adding to the cacophony of voices who are exploring these elements, the personal and shadow. Carl Jung’s shadow offers a rubric and a way to enter deeper into Whitehead’s story-scapes and life-scapes. The shadow is an archetype that consists of life instincts and exists as part of the unconscious mind composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts and shortcomings. While there might be some things that are dark and intense about this shadow element, it is here, buried within the psychology of every being, that the change and enlightenment happens. Once the shadow awakens, the evolution starts.
Tessa Whitehead. ‘I Have Too Many Teeth in My Mouth’. Oil on canvas. 20” x 18”. 2019. Work courtesy of the artist.
Dark Matter
“In the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.”
The making of works in ‘...there are always two deaths’ started in August 2018, and they have been swift to come. After a seven-year break from painting, it seems as though the canvases are welcoming a woman coming into a new understanding of herself, one a little less well behaved, a woman unruly in her sharing and abundant with her generosity. Also, a woman sacrificed.
“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”
It is against a patriarchal backdrop of social conditioning that Whitehead’s work can be seen as an antidote. As postcolonial subjects emerging from centuries of agony, loss and displacement, women now have the agency to ask themselves questions about their sense of self and being. When this is done, it is not pretty, and through deep internal work, the things that are felt and experienced have different cadences, timbres and syncopations.
Whitehead combines these emotional cues, recollections, losses and her cultural mélange with a powerful visual language to test the boundaries of what is possible as a physical act of encounter. It is at once about restraint, dying and starting over.
Historically, and even today with varied readings of an authentic Caribbean aesthetic—balancing the weights of history, perpetuating the myth of paradise, cultural identity or a myriad of things—under the weight of internal and external pressures, how does a woman find the space to occupy her life fully without only being seen as emotional? And why is “emotional” seen in such a negative and or reductive way in our contemporary societies? What can one learn from artists like Whitehead, who are making powerful reclamation works that include the personal, yet transcend it? I argue that the strength of Whitehead’s work is the fact that it is exploring the innumerable ways that the autobiographical can exist.
Within her chapters, she is ghoul, infant, friend, lover, congregant, brokenhearted, sister, passer-by, victim, warrior, suspect, witness and compatriot. She is a woman washing the saltwater healing off her body, moving away from an attack, moving into the attic; a wanderer lost in a dense forest being eaten by green, and witnessing a Caribbean Christmas chorus with her soon-to-be ex-husband in retreat.
From Whitehead, we learn how to move into the past with innocence to retrieve pieces of information vital to our present consciousness. We learn how to bind ourselves to a road less travelled, to time travel, to mourn without shame.
At 34, this unveiling and unraveling of her most sacred and delicate self is a gesture of generosity, a fight to fill her arsenal with the tools to confront truth, trauma and the active gift of love. We stand as accomplices, witnessing her transgressions and transformations.