WEST INDIES ELEGY

a homage to st martin

This series of intimate collage studies serves as a homage to the West Indies. Emerging from layered memories of Saint Martin, the works are shaped through sensation and recollection from my travels through the Northern Antilles as a child — tropical light, salt-burned architecture, sea air, and heat rising from the earth. The works move through abstraction as a form of poetic reconstruction. Geometric fragments, cut shapes, painted textures, and rhythmic compositions drift in and out of focus like displaced memory. Echoes of Cubist structure merge with an island pulse — part ritual, part improvisation — where shadow, color, and isle grit collapse into one another within a flattened spatial field. “I begin with the quiet narrative of place, though the real search happens through the building of materials — edges, texture, color, rhythm, compression, and scale. An echo of experience begins to form: a visual poem shaped by memory and the lingering pulse of the West Indies.” Throughout the series, I am interested in the emotional charge of the islands and the layered contradictions embedded within Caribbean space: beauty and erosion, celebration and displacement, colonial inheritance and cultural reinvention. For me, these explorations carry traces of folklore, mythology, and ceremony while resisting fixed narrative. Fragmented forms operate as emotional artifacts — remnants suspended between history and symbolism. Each piece functions as an elegy: an island reflection shaped through intimate accumulations of emotion, rhythm, and spirit — a place that remains deeply embedded within my visual language.