Nick Whittle (r) in conversation with National Cultural Foundation CEO Carol Roberts-Reifer and Gustavo Pandiani, the Ambassador of the Argentine Republic to Barbados. Photograph Copyright © 2019 by the NCF.
A Reaction to Nick Whittle’s Exhibition Other Lives
WITHOUT EXPENDING a huge amount of imagination, I find myself cast into the middle of a gigantic ocean. On a ship or, maybe, beneath it, at one with the churning waves.
Nick Whittle’s clay pot installation Ancestors can have that effect. Or has had that effect, for me at least, on both occasions I viewed it during Other Lives, his solo exhibition that ran at Queen’s Park Gallery from January to March this year. Monkey clay pots. Three hundred of them but looking like infinity, specially commissioned by the artist from the ceramicist Hamilton Wiltshire. Positioned spout-to-spout, handle-to-handle atop a large, raised wooden platform, conjuring a slave ship; the crammed-together pots suggesting shipments of African bodies. A vessel of vessels. Middle Passage occupying central space in a Barbadian art gallery.
On the ground beneath the amassed pots, coils of rope evoke an ocean, the Atlantic, turmoil. But also, somehow, tree roots, life-ropes, connectivity, rescue. And, in-between the twists and turns of rope, more earthenware—but these monkey pots are capsized; their small round lids, shackled off, lie scattered close by. No clay pot is broken.
I walk around and around this artwork and decide I like the statement I feel is being made. The Atlantic slave trade ripped Africans and us, their descendants, brutally and criminally from our roots, our connection, ourselves—but we are essentially, fundamentally unbroken. The work makes me think of hope, and family. Of my own roots and rootlessness and place in this world. How tenuous my own connections can feel sometimes. The pots make me think of survival; their unbroken but still vulnerable state suggestive of how tenuous that survival can also seem. How it seems in Barbados right now, especially as we appraoch Emancipation Day. The recent spate of violent killings, for instance—their cause and effect—makes that survival feel ever more fragile, and triumph—a state beyond survival that we should all be aiming for—further from our grasp. I imagine our ancestors looking grimly down at us. We got you this far, they admonish. We sacrificed! We suffered! And now what are you doing with your freedom? Frigging up the survival! Whittle’s monument—and indeed the entire exhibition, with its twist of perspective (that of a white man with Scottish lineage transplanted to the Caribbean)—adds to the noisy chatter in my head.
On my first encounter with Ancestors, named for Kamau Brathwaite’s iconic poetic masterwork, an art teacher from The St Michael School is in the gallery with her students. Some engage enthusiastically with the exhibits, examining them up close, making sketches, reading the accompanying notes, and discussing them among themselves or with the teacher and the curators. One or two quietly study Kamau’s own mounted statement, part of which expresses hope that “politicians, nut-sellers and nuff schoolchildren” will visit the show. One student does not engage, however. She sits removed, head bowed on knees, arms covering it, as if shielding.
“Not enjoying the show?” I ask her a short while later.
“Noooo…,” she responds. It is half-wail, half-sob. “I don’t know what to make of it, and it’s giving me a headache.”
I think to myself that her response is actually a valid one. Whittle’s pieces, with their blunt, brutalist imagery, openly provoke the viewer, are deliberately confrontational. The themes and subject matter he is tackling should give us headaches. Should make us reach for curatives.
Still later, as the teacher is rounding up her charges, a pupil scoots past, way too close to the clay pot installation. I want to say it is the same woebegone student, but I cannot swear to it. Her shoe scuttles one of the already overturned pots on the ground among the ropes. It chinks dangerously against another pot. The gallery gasps, holds its breath for a moment…and releases. No damage.
The wave of relief that passes over me—the intensity of it—as the pot remains intact, takes me by surprise.
Weeks later, I return for a second visit. And feel the same things, but deeper. Understand more about other pieces in the exhibition and the symbolism behind the objects used to create them: sardine cans (many sardine cans!) and basketry, and tartan and madras cloth, cowrie shells, one-cent coins, nails, crosses, encyclopedias, aloe plant, baobab seeds, bankers boxes, mirrors, and yet more monkey pots that the artist has employed in his exploration of the Middle Passage, slavery, commerce, colonization, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. The chalkboard outside, with the names of slave ships in a bowl and the invitation to fill and refill the board with those names.... So many ships, so many journeys. So many lives. Other lives—but, ultimately, our lives.
Eventually, my daughter, a student at The Lodge School, gets to visit the exhibition with her art class during Agrofest. She comes home and shares her teen critique with me: the clay pots in the rope sea ought to have been broken; it would be a more authentic expression of what actually happened, she announces.
I share with her what I have come to recognize as a state of satisfaction with the symbolism of unbroken clay pots, and in a rare moment of a teenager taking five minutes to consider anything a grown-up might think or say, she mutters, “Hmph...didn’t think of it that way.”
