DURING the covid19 pandemic, artist Wendy Nanan was going through her belongings and came upon her collection of West Indian dolls.
They inspired her to create an exhibition that explores various themes including race, commercialisation, cultural identity, and sexual harassment.
Nanan spoke about her exhibition West Indian Dolls, a Portrayal of Blackness with Newsday at the Medulla Art Gallery, Port of Spain.
The dolls were acquired during her travels with her father throughout the Caribbean in the 1990s in places such as Caracas, Cuba, Grenada, Santo Domingo and St Vincent. She said they were very expensive and sometimes her father would indulge her and pay for them.
In her statement about the exhibition, she explained that she was "first intrigued by the political and social implications of how we were representing ourselves in a modern, post-colonial society."
[caption id="attachment_1036969" align="alignnone" width="899"] The Help - courtesy Medulla Art Gallery[/caption]
The exhibition features dolls placed in eight dioramas.
One standout piece, Let Me Take You to the Mountain Tops, features three dolls. Nanan recalled two of the dolls were bought at a jumble sale at Greyfriars Church, Frederick Street, Port of Spain, (demolished in 2014). She also recalled she had to "fight" a little girl for them.
"I was looking at it and she came down and was looking at it. And I know I wanted it because it was so beautifully done."
There were three dolls in the sale, and she bought two and let the little girl have the third.
[caption id="attachment_1036968" align="alignnone" width="870"] Searching for La Belle Creole - courtesy Medulla Art Gallery[/caption]
In the piece, the two dolls flank a third, from Santo Domingo. She and her father went into a shop and Nanan was on the lookout for earrings made of lorimar (a blue silicate found only in the Dominican Republic).
"I saw this thing and I was so amazed, because this was the first doll I had ever seen...with an Afrocentric modern appearance to her. You see the natty hair, the full afro hair."
For the piece she changed the doll's costume to one with African colours, Jamaican beads and a cape.
"Because she is like the Caped Crusader. And she is pulling these two dolls with her, and she is saying, ‘Come...this is our time to come out of colonial attitudes.’"
[caption id="attachment_1036967" align="alignnone" width="906"] Meanwhile, somewhere down Pt Cumana - courtesy Medulla Art Gallery[/caption]
The other two dolls are in the costumes of colonial/post colonial female servants, but the middle one is a modern costume. And the mountain she is calling them up to is a reference to American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and his famous "I have a dream" speech. Through the mountains Nanan visually charts a journey from slavery to the Black Lives Matter campaign up to a plane that says, "You have come a long way."
Intricate work
She described another piece, Caribbean Madonna, as an autobiography, as it itemises all the bodies of work s
