The work by Jamaican artist Jasmine Thomas-Girvan is now on display in an exhibition titled Bathed in Sacred Fire at the Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

This is her first European solo exhibition and comes as a result of a multi-year collaboration between the contemporary art gallery Kunstinstituut Melly and Sour Grass, a curatorial agency based in Barbados that aims to foster a more comprehensive understanding of Caribbean contemporary art and culture. Gatherings and Passages is also an opportunity to raise awareness about colonial histories, and experiences of post-colonialism and decolonisation. This venture seeks to work with artists and creative practitioners from the Caribbean and across its diaspora, to build relationships with museums, cultural institutions, collectors, publishers, biennials, and both private and public entities.

According to Sour Grass, Bathed in Sacred Fire showcases ten works, the earliest going back to 2015 with the most recent including newly commissioned works and sculptures. The signature assemblages reflect Thomas-Girvan’s command of craft and her experimentation with techniques intersects with her interest in folklore and myth, as much as contested histories, orality and literature. Her inspirations range from carnival processions and jonkannu to the literary work of Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior and the stories of Anansi, a trickster archetype brought from west Africa to the Caribbean through oral histories by enslaved peoples, which figures in mythologies, traditions, rites of passage and rituals.

Among the works on display in Rotterdam are the sculpture Real Princess in which she addresses the complexities and nuances of the transatlantic slave trade and African Diasporas. In this cabinet of curiosity, the strategies of colonisation and resistance as experienced by Afro-Caribbean people are made central. Another work, Rooted, presents an exploration of landscape and cartography alluding to allegory and migratory patterns, common to the mass exodus from post-independent Anglophone countries. Axis Mundi from her Turntables series urges a new and deeper listening to ancestral voices; a rotation becomes a tremble, a treasure becomes a nesting.

Thomas-Girvan, who is based in Trinidad and Tobago, said she is invested in making new gestures and noises for a future where black people are self-aware and held in healing.

“These poetic assemblages often include anthropomorphised characters and depict or readily incorporate natural materials from Caribbean landscapes, including seeds and gourds, palm fronds and feathers, and detritus-turned-treasure washed up from the warming Atlantic.”

Thomas-Girvan studied textile and jewellery design in New York then began her artistic trajectory with applied arts. Over the years, the artist has increasingly shifted her practice from jewellery to sculpture. She has always explored Caribbean cultural histories, this focus becoming more evident as the dimensions of her work grew to imagine, conceptualise and spatialise more textured and intricate narratives.