JAMAICAN artist Laura Facey has never failed to make a grand statement. Her most recent work, Body and Blood of Christ, has elicited almost as much controversy as Redemption Song, the giant statue of a naked black couple that now stands at the ceremonial entrance to Emancipation Park in New Kingston.

On Wednesday, Facey made another big statement, this time for Jamaica and Jamaican art as her iconic work, Their Spirits Gone Before Them, was installed at the World Bank in Washington, DC for the opening of a major exhibition.

Titled ‘About Change’, the exhibition is a hemispheric survey of art organised by the World Bank in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the Organisation of American States.

The exhibition showcases emerging visual artists from the member countries of the World Bank Group’s Latin America and Caribbean region whose works are inspired by the idea of change.

About Change offers a unique opportunity for emerging artists to highlight the region’s concerns and achievements, while providing them with exposure within the international art community.

While Facey’s canoe installation is being exhibited at the World Bank, she will join fellow Jamaican artists Charles Campbell, Margaret Chen, Gerard Hanson, Marlon James, Michael Parchment, Ebony G Patterson, Oneika Russell, and Phillip Thomas in an IDB Cultural Centre programme focusing on the Caribbean and called ‘Contemporary Jamaican Artists: A Jamaican Presence in the About Change Exhibition’.

Jamaican art historian Petrine Archer, invited by the IDB Cultural Centre as catalogue essayist, in her text entitled Jamaican Art: Looking Back, Moving Forward, said that “…in the past decade, events ‘on the ground’ in Jamaica have made a number of the country’s contemporary artists more abruptly aware of the present. The art of this new millennium appears to be shifting in focus and style again in ways that reflect these artists’ acute sense of social issues and activism.”

When Facey was asked about the piece, she said: “Shortly after the unveiling of the Redemption Song monument — which stands at the ceremonial entrance to Emancipation Park in Kingston, Jamaica — I was asked to create souvenir miniatures of

the monument.

“One thousand sets of resin miniatures were duly made and assembled. Each figure represented approximately 900 slaves who were transported to Jamaica. Part way through this process I began to ‘see’ my miniatures in a canoe.

“A struggle began inside me: How can I take my healed Redemption Song figures and place them in a slave ship canoe? My husband, not knowing my inner turmoil, but sensing my interests as he often does, read to me from The True History of Paradise by Margaret Cezair Thompson: ‘…The slave ships had their bodies for a little while, but their spirits were already waitin’ for them in these mountains and guiding them here’.

“Permission granted, I went in search of the perfect vessel. In Jamaica, our fishermen hollow out canoes from giant cottonwood trees and I found such a canoe; my miniature figures were installed; the symbolic vessel was set on a sea of sugar cane and Their Spirits Gone Before Them emerged.”

Facey’s World Bank appearance marks the beginning of a series of international exhibitions at which her works will appear.