ALBERTA WHITTLE

– Jackie Kay, Ten Poems of Kindness, 2017.

Ten Poems of Kindness, a themed selection of verse, became a key touchstone for Alberta Whittlewhile developing her first solo exhibition at The Modern Institute. Alberta would read from thepamphlet and sit with its words before beginning to paint. The collection emerges from a tragedy, andfrom there sets out to map a territory – to emphasise the importance of a quality both vital but everhard to define. Alberta’s work unfolds from the poems of Norman MacCaig, Kae Tempest andRabindranath Tagore, amongst others, forming a poetic consideration of place, belonging and memory.

Alberta’s multifaceted practice is preoccupied with creating a personal response to the legaciesof the transatlantic slave trade, and this exhibition further develops her unpicking of itsconnections to institutional racism and climate emergency in the present. This can be understoodin terms of Christina Sharpe’s ‘wake work’ which takes shape in her book In the Wake: OnBlackness and Being (2016). Here Sharpe’s meditations on personal loss are set alongside astructural critique of anti-black violence which can be traced back to the Middle Passage.

In this presentation, connections across time and space come to the fore – in particular the artist’sfamily and various aspects of Barbadian vernacular culture. The walls of Osborne Street have beenpainted in a multi-colour gradient of pink, orange and lilac, conjuring ‘the fiery sunsets and moody dawnsof the Caribbean’ in the words of Daniella Rose King, whose newly commissioned text accompanies theshow. A new tapestry, Ring around the Rosy, woven by Dovecot Studios, encompasses both a senseof childhood joy and a haunted quality – the nursery rhyme is widely understood to reference the GreatPlague of London. The piece sits on a new gate, powder coated in municipal green, which referencesthe Caribbean built environment as well as the architecture of incarceration.

Alberta’s paintings engage with ideas around the Caribbean Gothic, a genre linked to the narrativedevice of the dead coming back to life – the oppressed resurfacing as zombies. The title of theexhibition and several of the paintings derive from Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) – aGothic postcolonial novel set between Jamaica and England. Several family members feature inAlberta’s paintings too, but their identity is always somewhat obscured – either hidden in darknessor masked by patterns calling to mind veves. The paintings are framed in wood which recall thefretwork found on the facades of many houses in Barbados. Together, the works represent an openoffering which collects a variety of interconnected histories, presenting different forms ofresistance and remembering.