Annalee Davis’ Reverence for Healing Plants and Restoring Post-Colonised Landscapes

Annalee Davis (b. 1963, Barbados) has a multi-faceted practice as a visual artist, cultural instigator, educator, and writer. Her practice focuses on post-plantation economies by engaging with the history and landscape of Barbados. Her studio is situated on a working dairy farm historically operational as a 17th-century sugarcane plantation, providing a critical context for her work. Drawing inspiration from activities such as drawing, walking, making (bush) teas, and cultivating living apothecaries, Annalee’s practice explores future reclamation, growth, and restoration strategies for previously colonised landscapes. Weaving together a reverence for healing plants and traditional knowledge maintained by women closely connected to their local botanical environments, Davis’ practice reveals the significance of botanicals and living plots as ancestral communal, learning, and healing sites.

Annalee received a BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art (1986) and an MFA from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (1989). She is currently presenting a solo exhibition – In the Sugar Gardens at the Airas Wang de Lafée, Girona, Spain, and participating in a group exhibition Spirit in the Land at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in Florida. Her 2023 work commissioned by the National Trust for Scotland, A Hymn to the Banished, was recently exhibited in Silent Archive, Inverleith House, RBGE, Edinburgh, Scotland, in Against Apartheid, KARST, Plymouth, UK, and in Seeds and Souls at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. A series of six large works on paper, Second Spring were exhibited in Linhas Tortas at Mendes Wood in São Paulo, Brazil. Pray to Flowers - A Plot of Disalientation was produced for the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present.

What brought you into the art world? Do you have any memories from your childhood that drove you to become an artist?

It was never a choice to be in the art world. Being an artist is all I have ever imagined I could do or be. I did not fully understand what it would mean, to be a visual artist–but it was clear from about age thirteen or fourteen that this was my vocation.

My paternal grandmother made paintings and my mother played the piano, embroidered, and occasionally painted murals in my older siblings' bedrooms. My four siblings each played musical instruments so there was space for creative expression in our home. A family friend from Haiti based in Dominica, Gilda Thébaud Nassief, was the only full-time practicing artist who came to our home presenting a different possibility to me as a young girl.

How has growing up in Barbados shaped you as an artist?

The broader history of Barbados as Britain’s first sugar isle, the impact of it being shaped as a plantation laboratory, and receiving a colonial education have shaped my life and work in many ways. Being raised on sugar plantations, and walking in former sugar cane fields as a regular ritual serves many purposes. This includes reducing my alienation from the living world and the particular landscape I’ve lived on for twenty-three years which has been mediated by the plantation for centuries. Walking challenges my thinking mind to expand my feeling-heart and experience the fullness of this terra firma beyond forced monoculture practices, human traumas, global marketplaces, and more recent extractive tourist economies.

*A Walker’s Diary - An Effort at Disalienation,* Mixed media on Daily Analysis Record sheets from Bulkeley Sugar Factory, topographic mural on the gallery wall, 2021. Photo Credit: Kunsthalle Bratislava

Can you describe your creative process?

My work often begins with words: words that I read, words exchanged in conversations with others to help me unpack ideas, and words that I write. Writing and reading against the grain of history is one way to locate the fissures, open them up, and allow other storylines to manifest, creating portals into our shared pasts where we may better understand our nuanced history. My art practice is an ongoing process of unraveling my schooling and through it, unlearning the plantation that sits within me.

The studio is where conversations about complex historical moments happen, where I confront history's chaotic past, which does not lie in some former time–the past echoes and infects the present. Drawing, embroidering, and growing small gardens allow me to function as a disparate cartographer contemplating entangled terrains in multiple ways. Tracing lines on paper, pressing leaves, and pulling threads acknowledge contradictory feelings about these grounds beneath my feet laden with historical violence and segregation. My consciousness was initially informed by innocent childhood experiences and a growing love for its beauty allowing for conflicting understandings of what took place on this small island.

*Pray to Flowers - A Plot of Disalienation*, A plot of healing plants and textile works using crochet, applique, and embroidery on domestic cotton, 2023. Photo credit: Shanavas Jamaluddin for the Sharjah Art Foundation.

**Can you tell us about your work Pray to Flowers - A Plot of Disalienation that you created for the Sharjah Biennial?**

Pray to Flowers - A Plot of Disalienation was a site-specific installation that involved the steady transformation of the Bait Al Hurma (Emirati for A Woman’s House) courtyard into a sanctuary on the occasion of the 15th Sharjah Biennial in the historic heart of the city in the UAE in early 2023. The work investigates the regenerative role of botanicals and plots as sites of refusal, counter-knowledge, community, and healing. This on-site living apothecary including one hundred different species was grown in collaboration with Rotterdam-based visual artist and researcher Yoeri Guépin and the Sharjah municipality, with a view toward longer-term sustainability beyond the biennial.

Informed by the intersection of history and ecology, these plots have made me think about the value of an interdisciplinary process combining living artworks with conversations, serving tea, a reading room, a seed depository, a blessing in the form of sound work, a mural of a topographic map grounding the work in Barbados’ plantation history, communally made embroidery panels, all together activating multiple senses to engage in more dynamic ways than the traditional relationship of viewer and object.

I use satin stitch to emphasise phrases that advocate, for example, the worship of flowers, a need to unlearn the plantation, or a call to pause and defend nature. Merging pale pink crochet pieces and machine-made lace gifted to me, this mash-up of fabrics, threads, and traditions acknowledges the creolization inherent in the formation of post-independent Barbados and the foundational role of women in its evolution. In their making, these textile works appreciate the gathering of women who joined me in their slow construction, thread by thread, words by many words, and the inherent need to commemorate slow cultural work communally.

*Pray to Flowers - A Plot of Disalienation*, (detail) A plot of healing plants and textile works using crochet, applique, and embroidery on domestic cotton, 2023. Photo credit: Shanavas Jamaluddin for the Sharjah Art Foundation.

Can you tell us about the new body of work that you have created for your current solo exhibition at Airas Wang de Lafée Gallery in Girona?

Airas Wang de Lafée has been a gracious and hospitable gallery to work with over the past year. In the Sugar Garden incorporates three new pieces including a wall-mounted herbarium. It opens with two small studies of parasites on ledger pages establishing a context for the show.

In Sugar Cone - A Motherplot, the Girona-based collection of potted plants builds a bridge to this less familiar geographical context harking back to those who have fostered traditional relationships with the more-than-human world.

In discussions with Sira Pizà, curator of In The Sugar Gardens, I learned from her about a community in the High Pyrenees called the Trementinaires. This group of women lived in secluded valleys in the mountains of northern Spain in the early 19th century and were named after their most sought-after product, trementina or turpentine. The Trementinaires fashioned their annual cycle of harvesting, manufacturing, and traveling as healers with collections of medicinal herbs foraged from the valley which they transported in skirt pockets or packed in small tin boxes. Traveling in groups of two, these women traversed the mountainous trading routes in fall and winter, bringing well-being to isolated communities without access to formal medicine and relying on traditional knowledge systems held by women in close relationship with their local botanical environments.

Sugar Cone - A Motherplot highlights revolutionary and subversive botanical histories, acknowledging them as agents of restoration and reparation while insisting on the need for us to remember valuable systems of knowledge often erased or forgotten, whether in the Caribbean archipelago or the High Pyrenees. Eleven potted plants, nine typical of the Catalan region and two from Barbados, have been fostered by Catalan-based Andrew Birk who has carefully sown seeds to cultivate this small-scale nursery. Understanding the plantation as the colonial project that erased our relationship with the motherland, for me, the act of growing a garden or small plot is a way to disalienate and reconnect with the soil offering a way to care for generational trauma, and to mother a motherless land.

*Sugar Cone - A Motherplot,* made in collaboration with Eloi Mora, 2024. Photo credit: Joan Divi for Airas Wang de Lafée Gallery

Reminiscent of my Second Spring series (2019), the sugar cone mimics drooping post-menopausal breasts proposing that necessarily altered relationships with the land must be that of nurture and sustenance. Returning to more ritualistic interactions with our environments and one another fosters fertile ground for nuanced dialogue, prompting a collective reconsideration of our encounters with a common climate heritage, shared histories, and cultural identities as equal members of an earth family. To realise this work, gallery director Pepe Diví facilitated my collaboration with Eloi Mora, master potter and director of Bonadona Terrissers Ceramic (1922), a fourth-generation artisanal pottery on the outskirts of Girona to fashion this purpose-built cone embossed with crochet patterns at its lower end. Hovering over the plot, its overarching presence sits in front of a large mural of topographical contour lines of the landscape where I live and work referring to the inextricable relationship between historic plantation land management and colonial endeavours adversely affecting biodiversity and climatic shifts.

*Pray to Flowers* (detail) A series of five textile works using crochet, applique, and embroidery on domestic cotton, 2023. Photo credit: Joan Divi for Airas Wang de Lafée Gallery

An Unbound Book of Prayer, installed in the far corner of the Sun Room, is a work in progress comprising six of nine embroidered and appliqued handheld-size pieces of linen hung closely together. Enriched with fabric scraps dyed with turmeric root harvested from my garden, tea, and sorrel, I allude to plants of traditional use value while confronting domestic alienation. Seen as hymn sheets, An Unbound Book of Prayer is intended as secular daily devotionals, reminiscent of and inspired by the bounty and sacrality of the living world.

What would be a dream project for you to work on?

Working communally to grow small plots has been something I have enjoyed tremendously. I have learned so much during these collaborative processes and through the relationships with those who draw on different knowledge systems. A dream project for me would be to transform the land surrounding my home and studio into a beautiful, nurturing, sacred, and peaceful medicinal plot in collaboration with two local self-taught botanists, Ken Brown, and Ras Ils, and in conversation with Spiritual Elder, Ireka Jelani and retired Biology professor, Dr. Sean Carrington.

Are there any artists who have especially inspired you?

While pursuing my undergraduate degree at MICA, I admired the work of two women artists in the pantheon of an almost exclusively white male Western art history curriculum–that of Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe. Their unorthodox lives suggested other prospects outside of the narrowly prescribed options based on notions of respectability or the acquisition of wealth. Kahlo’s autobiographical work and O’Keeffe’s intimate relationship with the land stirred me and I acquired all the books published on them as a young university student in the 80’s.

Dominican writer Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a canonical text in post-colonial Caribbean literature speaks to the entangled nature of the Caribbean–a fertile and lush archipelago–as an entrapped space that recognises feelings of isolation that can lead to insanity. This novel allows the reader to reckon with loving a small place that is simultaneously a refuge and a site of estrangement.

I experience the landscape as a constant source of inspiration, a living textbook providing stability, knowledge, magic, and sanctuary while also trembling with volatility and uncertainty.

Any exciting plans you’re currently working towards?

I have two upcoming residencies which I am looking forward to. The first is at the London-based Ruby Cruel, run by Bahamian artist Blue Curry in July, and the second in September at the rurally located Denniston Hill in Upstate New York.

Additionally, I’m working with curators toward two solo exhibitions in 2026, one in Barbados and the other in the US. These contrasting environments and contexts will offer different opportunities for collaboration and new challenges, forcing me to stretch in unanticipated ways.

https://annaleedavis.com/

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