DOCUMENT ME
After seven years of manipulating the body and locating faceless silhouettes in their claimed spaces; in front or behind vending stalls, approaching or sitting outside a familiar bar, or just liming at the edge of the road, I thought my defining brush stokes were far from complete in capturing this elusive Trinbagonian. I have been preoccupied with identifying and encapsulating the visual essence of this being, as I believe it to exist, to be unique and unmistakable.
At first I thought it to be the stance of a man, which at a glance held that essence. A short foray into the iconography and symbols of Africa led me to study the features of the human face. This is when I discovered that it might be through a facial expression that I could define a Trinbagonian. I sought to extrapolate a local mask from the faces of these people. Initially, I used photographs taken while driving around the islands. I then expanded my source material to include selections from the local newspapers.
A platform is provided daily, by the media, for the voice of the people to be heard. I scour the newspapers for any face that speaks to me and systematically tear out from each paper the opinion poll, an odd head from the business section and a random head from the sporting section. I use these images as a starting point as they are taken from a cross-section of the society. At this point, I am not yet interested in what these people are quoted as saying, that will come later, but rather what they are telling me with their eyes, the other story.
In this exhibition, these 46 heads are not portraits of the photographs from the newspaper clippings but rather are a portrayal of a current state of being, a document highlighting the condition of the Trinbagonian. I draw each line that I see etched onto the face in the clipping. I exaggerate the scale and tonal values of these faces. Somewhere between drawing and picking up my brush, a shift comes. The face in the paper merges with a face in my mind; a person that I know but cannot easily recall. Yet everyone who sees a painting recalls someone that they know, who claims the essence of the being I have created.
Rachel Amy Rochford
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