Film Screening: Breaking the Surface

Island For Sale, uses humour and performance to critique the ways the Caribbean is packaged, marketed, and sold through tourism. Inspired by souvenir T-shirts and vacation branding, the work responds to the familiar promise that paradise is available to anyone with enough money to buy it.

In series of staged beach performances, the artist poses as though she too is part of the attraction. Positioned within postcard like views, she becomes another sight/site of consumption, alongside the land, and the image of the island itself. By exaggerating the logic of tourism marketing, the work asks what it means when entire places are reduced to commodities, and how those who call these lands home are implicated in the sale.

The making of a sea spirit began with a dream and a desire to imagine another relationship to place. At the time, I found myself thinking about the rapid development of many of the beaches and swimming spots I return to whenever I am home. Through the figure of a sea spirit, I became interested in imagining a presence that could move through spaces differently, one that might reclaim, protect, or remain connected to the coastline despite ongoing transformation.

As the work develops, I also wonder about folklore, spirituality, and the stories we tell about the sea. While I am still figuring out my own relationship to these traditions, I am interested in how figures such as sea spirits, river mothers, and other supernatural beings continue to occupy Caribbean landscapes and imaginations. I hope these works can exist somewhere between dream, speculation, and personal reflection to further explore these ideas.