visual artist — Junkanoo Processional

The first installation of “Views” was on display in Kassel, Germany, from June 18 to Sept. 25, 2022, as part of “documenta fifteen,” an international contemporary art exhibition that takes place every five years. *Photo credit: Demar Brackenridge.*

While walking along a winding stretch of beach in the coastal town of Arbroath, Scotland, Jamaican artist Camille Chedda found and photographed a trail of red, clay bricks dotting the shoreline. The bricks, worn and weathered, were washed up from the tides of the North Sea, the company names etched on their faces — “Glenboig” and “Forth and Thistle” — the only clue as to their origins.

After researching the corporations, Chedda learned that Forth and Thistle’s bricks had been used to construct the distilleries at Appleton Estate in Jamaica, a sugar plantation in the parish Chedda was raised in, St. Elizabeth.

The discovery prompted the multidisciplinary artist to turn to her sketchbook. She reimagined her 2015 sketches that depicted women embracing the concrete building blocks used in many Caribbean nations’ structures with the bricks in their place. Her drawings grew from questions sparked by the leftover environmental destruction she witnessed in Haiti in 2015 and the viral dancehall trend in Jamaica of women bashing cement blocks against their crotches.

“The women that I would draw, they were holding the bricks, and I was thinking about the relationship between the women with the concrete blocks, women with the bricks and the destruction of both,” she said of the 2017 sketches.“The bricks’ destruction was a kind of colonial destruction and perhaps those cement blocks were the same, too.”

"Under Construction"

Chedda’s 2017 sketches, comprised of charcoal on paper, are loosely based on images from videos of a viral 2015 Jamaican dancehall trend. Photo courtesy of the artist and caption adapted from the artist’s.

"Catastrophe of Liberation"

Chedda’s 2017 sketches, comprised of charcoal on paper, are loosely based on images from videos of a viral 2015 Jamaican dancehall trend. Photo courtesy of the artist and caption adapted from the artist’s.

The sketches inspired Chedda’s work to take on a new motif: the architecture of Jamaica’s plantation houses, known as Great Houses, and estates. From her 2020 “Untitled” and 2021 collage, “...We all live under the same sky” to 2022’s “Views,” she repurposed the concrete blocks as frames for images of the houses, landscapes and artifacts of Jamaica’s colonial past.

Chedda revisited the themes of much of her previous work, interrogating the construction, fragmentation and destruction of Jamaican identity in a self-proclaimed post-colonial society through her exploration of the properties’ transformations. Her cinder-block art seeks to unveil the remnants of colonial history hidden beneath the nation’s “no problem” attitude and tourism industry, calling viewers to confront the past in the images and videos filling her creations’ spaces.

“Work like ‘Views,’ it might just be talking about Rose Hall, but it’s actually bigger picture,” she said of another plantation estate. “If we accept Rose Hall as this Annie Palmer, fairytale situation where it's okay for this white woman to have owned slaves but she’s a celebrated figure — If that happens there, then what are we doing in our daily lives? We don't appreciate the fact that there's this dark history.”

Minding the Horrors

"Rose Hall Jamaica Photo D Ramey Logan.jpg” by Don Ramey Logan, CC-BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons.

Out of the few plantation houses and estates still standing after the 1831 Christmas Rebellion, an eleven-day uprising carried out by nearly 60,000 enslaved Afro-Jamaicans, the Rose Hall Great House is the island's most renowned.

St. James planter George Ash began its construction in 1750, possibly naming the edifice after his wife Rosa. But her fourth husband, John Palmer, completed the Jamaican-Georgian mansion in 1780, outfitting it with 365 windows, 52 doors and 12 windows. After the Palmers died in the mid-to-late 18th century, John’s nephew and his wife, Annie, assumed ownership of the estate.

Annie Palmer ruled over Rose Hall as a harrowing enslaver, committing a number of atrocities against the hundreds of enslaved Africans forced to labor on the property. She gained notoriety in Jamaican folklore for brutally murdering three of her husbands, taking enslaved African men as lovers and disposing of them as she saw fit, and ultimately dying by one such lover’s hand. The gruesome legend of her cruelty and fate, believed to have originated from John Costello’s 1868 pamphlet, “Legend of Rose Hall,” dubbed her the “White Witch of Rose Hall.”

This warm-toned illustration of towering white, gates opening toward the distant Rose Hall Great House was published in 1825 in James Hakewill’s “A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, From Drawings Made in the Years 1820 and 1821,” in which the English architect documented and described an array of edifices and monuments on the island at the time.

In 1820, English architect James Hakewill estimated the estate, then adjoined with nearby land, spanned approximately 2,000-acres with around 200 devoted to grass fields, 250 to wilderness and another 200 to sugar cane fields. The Great House fell into disrepair over the course of the century but was purchased and restored by American entrepreneur John Rollins in the 1960s.

The now 7,000-acre estate is a bustling Montego Bay-area tourist attraction and historic site. Today, the property boasts two, nearly 7,000-yard golf courses, seven wedding and event spaces, thousands of acres of residential and commercial real estate, the restored Rose Hall Great House and the nearby Cinnamon Hill Great House that was once home to American musician Johnny Cash. Rose Hall is open to visitors for daily historical tours and nightly ghost tours, the former of which is also available as part of a $130 USD bundle called “Annee’s Escape.”

“Rose Hall Before Reconstruction” by Jasonbook99, CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons.

Never mind the horrors that took place in its dungeon — renovated into a bar serving “Witches Brew” cocktails — or the bear trap formerly used to ensnare enslaved Africans who dared to flee on display in its interior. The alleged presence of enslaver and murderer Annie Palmer’s ghost is, in part, what most attracts guests to the property, according to its website.

Chedda challenged the estate’s transformed image in her 2022 installation “Views,” which swapped her usual cement blocks with their “conceptual extension” in wood. She fit transparent images of Rose Hall’s manicured golf courses, plantation estates, coconut trees and sugar plantations into the windows of the blocks and suspended them from the ceiling with thin wire.

Hanging at eye-level, the piece, according to her artist statement, forced viewers to confront these distortions of Jamaica’s cultural heritage intended to shroud histories of African enslavement and displacement for the benefit of tourism.

“View, 2,” the second iteration of Chedda’s “Views” was on display at the December 2022 installment of the “…and I resumed the struggle” exhibition series. The wooden blocks hung from the ceiling, forcing viewers to engage them. *Photo credit: Kevaughn Beckford.*

An Identity in Fragments

The controversies surrounding Rose Hall came to the forefront in 2019 when Jamaica’s Miss Universe contestant donned a glamorous, appliqued gown and crystal-encrusted headdress portraying the White Witch of Rose Hall.

Some Jamaicans decried the costume for presenting an enslaver as a symbol of national pride, while others praised it for showcasing a lesser known part of the culture before a global stage. For Chedda, the display and following debate laid the foundation for “Views,” serving as a reminder of what she considers the fragmentary identity of the island nation.

Chedda’s “Views” fits images of Rose Hall’s manicured golf courses, plantation estates, coconut trees and sugar plantations into the windows of the blocks, turning the metaphor for construction into a frame. *Photo credit: Demar Brackenridge.*

“When I say it's fragmentary, [I mean] there are pieces missing — there’s something that was a whole… something that was full and then because of transatlantic slave trade things shattered in different ways or got influenced, and shards got mixed around,” she said.

Those shards reflect many Jamaicans’ reluctance to discuss, let alone acknowledge, race as a factor in their everyday lives. According to Chedda, many citizens maintain that racism has no bearing on their society, instead naming issues with classism and unequal wealth distribution as the country’s primary issue.

Despite their refusal to see race, Chedda said, many still uphold Jamaica’s colorist hierarchy through what they call “shadism,” associating those with lighter skin with wealth and positive qualities, and those of darker complexions with poverty and negative characteristics.

She showcased “Views” and its conceptual predecessors — 2020’s “Untitled,” a summer 2021 installation called “Rebuild” and December 2021 collage titled “...We all live under the same sky” — in the “...and I resume the struggle” (A.I.R.T.S.) exhibition series she co-founded and co-curated with Jamaican visual artists Phillip Thomas, John Campbell, Kimani Beckford and Greg Bailey. The regionally acclaimed series contends with questions of power, privilege and post-coloniality in Jamaica and grapples with the concerns around climate, cultural and global identity, and social politics that the pandemic’s onset illuminated.

"Untitled"

“Untitled” debuted at the inaugural exhibition of the “…and I resumed the struggle” series at the Olympia Gallery in 2020. The cinder blocks act as windows showcasing images of Chedda, the Rose Hall Great House and other Jamaican iconography. Photo credit: Charles Allen.

"We all live under the same sky..."

The cement block-laden collage of Jamaican buildings and landscapes was on display as part of the third “…and I resume the struggle” exhibition that ran from December 2021 to January 2022. Photo credit: Franz Marzouca.

The initial group show debuted in-person after COVID-19 guidance eased in the country in December 2020, presenting the work of 12 Jamaican artists — a mix of established creatives and recent grads from Edna Manley college (where Chedda works as a visual art professor) — and three artist panels at the Olympia Gallery in Kingston for two months. A.I.R.T.S has since seen four more expanded exhibitions between 2021 and 2023. The most recent one, (IN)DEPENDENCE, concluded at the end of January.

With the cement blocks either a focal point or background motif in the displays, Chedda’s work in each of the exhibitions called on viewers to question their relationships to Jamaica’s historical sites and their colonial beginnings alongside the ways they’ve been taught to see themselves through the structures.

Meant to remind the viewer of both rubble and a pyramidal shrine, Chedda debuted the first iteration of “Rebuild” in 2015 at the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince Haiti. *Photo credit: L* *and caption adapted from the artist’s*.

In her artist statement for “Rebuild,” a continuation of her 2015 Ghetto Biennale installation in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, of the same name, Chedda explains her hope that Jamaicans might “rebuild ourselves anew” from the resulting catastrophe of colonialism.

“I want viewers to be more aware of the fact that there was this history — for example at Rose Hall Great House — that there was a trauma that would have happened on the land that I feel like is being ignored or veiled by a touristic vantage point,” she told Digital Junkanoo. “It's like the trauma is being hidden underneath a smile.”

“Views” and other work aims to “highlight aspects of our culture and our identity in a way that people will think about it and will really be more sensitive to the idea of our own — even blackness.” she continued, citing many Jamaicans’ struggles with skin bleaching and some dancehall songs’ violent lyrics.

Post-Coloniality and We

Chedda’s objection to Jamaica’s cultural fragmentation stems from her own search for an identity as a Black woman on the island. Through sketches of broken bodies and self-portraits eroded from the impernance of paint on her plastic bag canvases, she considers the value ascribed to Jamaican people, particularly Afro-Jamaicans, in an effort to self-define.

She described her pursuit to determine her value in the pieces that flake off her creations and the materials she uses to construct them in an ART(ist) video for the Rubis Mécénat endowment fund: “It contains, and I contain my words. It covers, and I was hiding my ugliness, my truth, my identity. It protects, and I was being shielded from people’s words, abuse, pressure. It preserves, and I was trying to preserve my sanity,” she said in the video.

Camille Chedda, Portrait. *Photo courtesy of the artist*.

Art helped Chedda, born in Manchester and raised in St. Elizabeth’s Santa Cruz, cope with the challenges she faced at home. Her love for drawing grew out of copying her older sister, and she continued developing her creative practice long after her sister quit, ultimately becoming her high school’s designated “art person.”

When she realized that she could study art professionally after graduating, the decision to pursue it as a career came easily. She completed an honors bachelor of fine arts program at Edna Manley College in Kingston and went on to earn a masters in paintings from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Painting, drawing and sculpting empowered her to look at herself and, in turn, dive into research about who Jamaicans are in general, she said. “It led to thinking about the post colonial situation that we're in, and how that dictates the way people view privilege or power so that affects where people decide to live, what people wear.”

As she and her collaborators work to develop the next installment of A.I.R.T.S, slated for this December, Chedda has also embarked on a project for community arts non-profit Kingston Creative as part of a new Global Co-commission initiative called “A Feral Commons.” The co-commission chose three international artists to approach the subject of climate change in a public work that examines humans’ interdependence with nature in the artists’ respective corners of the globe.

Chedda will assemble her installation at the neglected Lower South Camp Park in Kingston and explore the edible and medicinal Rice and Peas bush’s role as a pollinator in the overgrown environment. She plans to create an apiary for the bees that community members can cultivate, build new skills from and source honey from.

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The project, she said, is similar to “Views” in how it questions what was once present on the land and how that past has been transformed or left behind. But it also carries over the sculpture’s ruminations on Jamaica’s post-colonial identity and her personal identity, as evidenced by the presence of cement blocks, which appear as part of the apiary’s core structure in her pre-planning sketches.

“I feel they represent two different mindsets that I'm in,” Chedda said of her two preferred art materials: concrete blocks and plastic bags. “Maybe certain things haven't been resolved in either one, but they represent me still going through this process of trying to uncover this identity.”

To learn more about Chedda’s work and process, visit www.camillechedda.com or view the artist’s Instagram.