Indentureship

This series explores notions of archive and ancestry. After the British abolished slavery in 1833, a million Indians were exported from 1838 to 1917 into indentured servitude in British Guiana,  Trinidad, Jamaica, Suriname, Mauritius and Fiji. They came by shipload to the colonial islands to work the sugar, cocoa and coffee plantations. Living conditions were no better than those of the recently freed slaves. I am inspired by the photograph of my great-great grandmother, Roonia. The back of the photograph offers much information: Roonia boarded the Golden South in Calcutta a single Hindu woman in 1865, and disembarked in Guyana, and married an Afghani Muslim, Machedini (anglicized to McKenzie). She died at the age of 105 in 1936, having served her indentureship and birthed my paternal lineage that migrated to Trinidad. I ask the viewer to consider, acknowledge, understand and transmute in contemporary times the historical barriers of class, caste, race, migration and colonialization.

Illuminated, literally sheds light on predominantly shunned women. I created porcelain “panes” out of handmade clay. Each “pane” illuminates the archival photograph of an Indo-Caribbean indentured woman.

Division focuses brings into focus the gross disparity between the workers and their masters through the suggestion of an everyday object, a Victorian room divider, that might well have been in the homes of the plantation owners. The tension between servant and served and temporarily suspending the division between the classes and the racial hierarchy.