Annalee Davis Exhibition & Artist In Conversation
A Hymn to the Banished is a multi-part print edition which was commissioned as part of the National Trust for Scotland’s ongoing mission to face the legacies of slavery and empire in its properties. Davis’ box set of print works takes this landscape as a historic point of departure, drawing a thread from 1800 when Francis Humberston MacKenzie, landowner of Lochalsh and Kintail in northwest Scotland, became Governor of Barbados. Known as Britain’s first sugar isle, its economic prosperity was built upon the labour of enslaved Africans, white indentured servants, both men and women, and the sugar trade.
A Hymn to the Banished insinuates an interlacing of imperial linkages between Barbados and Scotland, inferring centuries of social disruption caused by the plantation system and the colonial project. With the forced transplantation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and numerous Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English indentured labourers, systems of knowledge and rituals crossed the world’s ocean currents, building new cultures in the foreign lands of the West Indies. British imperialism imposed banishment and generated suffering. Yet, deep knowledge and a desire to heal profound traumas elicited practices that relied on ancient traditions connected to the land and the remembering of sacred rites. Recognising the intuition, knowledge, and tenacity needed to confront cruel, brutal conditions, A Hymn to the Banished expresses the desire to repair the ills of British Empire-era indentureship and transatlantic chattel slavery.
On Wednesday 5 June, 3.45-5.30pm, please join us at the Learning Loft, Wardlaw Museum, The Scores, St Andrews, and online via MS Teams, for an in-conversation event with the artist, Dr Jillian Sutherland and Dr Ariadne Collins. Taking A Hymn to the Banished as its starting point, the conversation will explore histories of diaspora and their display, political ecology, and the links between colonialism and climate crisis.
Booking and further information via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-hymn-to-the-banished-tickets-875894813967
Annalee Davis is a Barbadian visual artist and writer whose practice combines history and biography in discussions of ‘post-plantation economies’ with cultural activism in the arts sector. Davis’ works explore Barbados' transformation from a once biodiverse landscape to sugar plantations and more recently a tourism-dependent island, arguably sectors of enclosure and exclusion. She understands the plantation as an economic model irrevocably impacting the contemporary environment whose historical legacy has been traumatically inscribed upon the landscape and its people. Working in her studio located on an operational dairy farm–once a 17th-century plantation– Davis exposes the poly-vocal narratives buried beneath the land. Drawing, walking, making (bush) teas, and growing living apothecaries, her practice suggests future strategies for repair and thriving while investigating the role of botanicals and living plots as ancestral sites of refusal, counterknowledge, and healing.
This activity is supported by the St Andrews Centre for Contemporary Art, Centre for Art and Politics, Centre for Amerindian, Latin American Studies and Caribbean Studies, and Scotland’s Future Series. It is part of a wider research project that was selected by the European Research Council (ERC) and funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) with project reference: EP/X023036/1.For more information, please see the Transnational Island Museologies website.
Image Credit - Annalee Davis, Detail from A Book of Healing Plants, 2022. Photo by Iain Turnbull.