Ann Rudder: "Before I'm Dead"

ANN RUDDER wants me to talk to her before she’s dead.  I’m not so sure why.  Anyone who knows Ann knows she’s a force of nature.

“Call me, Robert,” she pleaded the last time we saw each other at a NIFCA art exhibition launch.  “Before I’m dead.”

That was over two years ago.  She was a young 73 at the time.

Thankfully, Ann and her impressive, expansive heraldic work are both still with us.

I’ve tried to hook up with Ann to have the kind of chat we’ve been promising to have about her artwork, Barbados, life.  She was born in the US, in New Jersey, raised there by her Bajan parents.  She migrated to their island of birth, and her new home, in the late 1980s.

We had a couple near misses because of conflicting schedules.  After my last attempt to set up an interview in December 2017, she left me this voice mail message on Christmas Day:

You can check my current status in the 2018 Miller Ins & Outs of Barbados, Page 192 and 193, and after that we’ll see if there’s something more to discuss.  I’m really between processes right now, so other than what [Sarah Venable, who wrote the profile,] has captured, I have to forge ahead.  So I thank you for thinking of me.  Not sure where the future is strictly on this Christmas Day, but to you and yours I wish the best wishes for 2018.  Bye for now.

Bye.  For now.

Often dressed in totally coordinated outfits from her ornately trimmed pillbox hat to patterned and applique fabrics and fairy princess shoes, textile artist Ann Rudder operates in constantly creative high gear. That energy has propelled her to leave many marks on this island.

…[S]he has restored or designed scores of plaques, banners and emblems for clubs, schools and organizations. They adorn places as disparate as St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Barbados Yacht Club, St Ann’s Fort (BDF Headquarters), Parliament, the law courts and the Cabinet Office. It’s the heraldry that’s really important to her. Her practiced eye can read the history behind the heraldry. Ann can tell you what the flora, fauna and objects represent, and what the meaning is likely to be. She can also work the other way around: provide her the information about your organization, let’s say, and she can construct for you a coat of arms or banner that uses heraldic symbols to express its bearer’s role in society.

That’s part of Venable’s take on her.  For more, you can read here. 

On the visual arts scene in Bim for the last three decades, Ann’s more than a force of nature.  She’s closer to a law unto herself, like one of her banners or coat of arms: not about to retire or expire anytime soon.  RES