Sculptor

Born in Kingston to a well-to-do family, Moody left Jamaica at aged 23, initially to pursue a career in dentistry. This was not necessarily his first choice, he was already widely read in Chinese and Indian metaphysics and showed an aptitude for the arts. While still a student he visited the British Museum and was so affected by the Egyptian and Asian collections there that he taught himself to carve. By the time he had completed his dental studies in 1930, he had also become a proficient artist creating significant works such as Wohin (1934; Sacramento, CA, Adolf Loeb priv. co.), and Johanaan (1935; London, Tate).

These gigantic heads are archaised forms that pay homage to Eastern philosophy rather than Greek classicism. They communicated an idealised and universal understanding of man’s origins that went against the grain of fascist tendencies already apparent in prewar Europe. The success of these pieces and his first exhibition in Europe encouraged Moody to move to Paris where he stayed until the outbreak of the war when he was forced to flee the German occupation. After a hazardous journey across the Pyranees into Spain, he made it back to London in 1941 stricken with pleuracy that would plague him for the rest of his life.

Moody's wartime experiences and and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima would have a lasting effect on his work as he explored the frailty of mankind and man’s need for spiritual development. His postwar figures such as Three Heads (wood, 1946), although retaining their characteristic stillness also reflected his loss of innocence and concern for the fate of modern man. Moody’s ability to select and work with wood, releasing the movement and tensions of their grain have meant that his large heads have aged with dignity cracking and fracturing in ways that give even greater appeal, profundity and vulnerability as they mature.

Moody’s sentiments towards the Caribbean appear more positive. In 1964 he was commissioned to create a sculpture for the University of The West Indies. His metal sculpture Savacou (cast aluminium, h. 2.13 m) is a symbolic bird that harks back to Taino traditions intended to create pride in the Caribbean tradition and hope for New World civilization.

Moody died in England in 1985, but his sculpture and contribution to the arts in that country has gained greater visibility, championed by his niece Cynthia Moody. His work can now be found in important collections such as the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate, London as well as the National Gallery of Jamaica.

© PA-S

David Miller Jnr’s relationship with his father David Miller Jnr was crucial to his development as and artists, and it is rare that one is mentioned without the other, despite their stylistic differences. David Miller was apprenticed to his father in their carpentry business established on Bray Street of Windward Rd. They regularly did trades work for the house building business, but when that was slow, they wood create carvings for sale to the tourists that normally docked at Kingston Harbour. They did not sell directly to the public but instead used a middle man. In this way, they were insulated from the more commercial aspects of tourism trade, rarely dealing with the public and pricing of their work. When visitors did come to their workshop, the pair never haggled over prices but instead placed their work on display in a showcase that visitors were free to select from or leave. This is how they maintained their dignity as craftsmen and artists.

It is said that the family were Jehovah’s Witnesses but nothing in that spiritual tradition prepares the viewer for their images that seem to balk against Old Testament cautions against the creation of graven images. The Millers were adamant that their images were not idols but based on their faith and this is born out by the sense of reverence with which they treat the human form. In particular David Miller Jnr’s heads are a testament to racial dignity and bring a sense nobility to the depiction of black people during that time. Creating oversized heads with exaggerated racial features that were normally smoothly finished and highly polished, the craftsmanship in his pieces transcend carvings produced as souvenirs today. In fact, the distinctiveness of his imagery as well as their mysterious symbolism, such as horns and sacred markings suggest that these images were deliberately intended to communicate ideas about black divinity that paralleled the messages of  Garveyism and later Rastafarianism.

David Miller Jnr's death just eight years after his father’s suggests the empathy that existed within their partnership. It was a working relationship that had lasted more than sixty years and when it ended, they took with them an understanding of these works forever lost to the contemporary viewer.PA-S

Its unusual to speak about David Miller, the father without also mentioning his son of the same name. As carpenters and curio craftsmen they worked together, initially with David the son being an apprentice too his father. Regularly exhibited together, their works are conceptually similar, but stylistically very different.

Initially, the Millers created carvings for Jamaica’s growing tourist industry. They operated a workshop on Bray Street off Windwards Rd where in addition to making their furniture and when house-building was slow, they also made curious that bore their signatures and a typical reference to Jamaica W.I.

It is easy to see how the Millers were the predecessors the craftsmen of today’s flourishing souvenir trade that caters to tourists on the north coast. Once their carvings were discovered by the art world and very quickly elevated to the status of sculpture, even though they themselves continued to refer to them as carvings. Examined closely however, there is nothing kitch or commercialized about David Miller Snr’s carvings and even though his titles of works such as Talisman or Fetish  or Demon have been read as an attempt to exoticise his images for the sake of sales, it is more likely that they refer to are an honest expression of his spiritual beliefs that tap into developing ideas of race, spirituality and identity at that time. Certainly, Miller Snr himself tells us that his first sculpture of a Rasta was created out of his curiosity at the new phenomenon when he first encountered a rastaman at the Institute of Jamaica. Ironically, meeting David Miller in person was similarly like an encounter with a biblical figure as Robert Verity recalls. “…Very often ‘Pops’ who had the face, the presence and the resounding  voice of an Old Testament patriarch would pause in his chipping away at a piece of wood to propound their faith as Jehovah’s Witnesses and to explain the fine distinction between carving and a graven image…These men spent their lives working with integrity and serene dignity – turning wood into beauty and enriching the lives of those who came to know them and their work”. (The Intuitive Eye exh. cat. , National Gallery of Jamaica, 1979)David Miller Snr’s long white beard characterized him as a spiritual figure and something of a mystic, and it is this same sense of cosmic understanding that attends his work. Many of his works bear symbols such as the rose, lily, intricate patterning, and symbolic writing that suggest his wide intellect and exposure to mystical thought. His was a fertile imagination and even though his techniques were somewhat cruder than his son’s, his works are more varied in form and content. They suggest an understanding of the cosmos yet to be explored.PA-S

Marriot was born into an artistic family, his mother was a musician and writer while his father made and sold straw items. From an early age, encouraged to explore his own creativity, he developed an interest in wood and earned his earliest commissions when he was still a teenager. After completing school, he apprenticed as a furniture maker. His skills gained him employment locally working with Art Deco furniture designer Burnett Webster executing custom furniture, and then abroad, first as a carpenter in Panama, and later as a farm worker in USA. By the 1940’s, he was featured in local newspapers as an enterprising sculptor: and while in America he presented a bust of then President F.D. Roosevelt, to the White House.

Essentially self-taught, Marriot gained the opportunity to study art formally when he won a British Council scholarship to London. At the Camberwell School of Art, he developed his talents as a sculptor more methodically, adopting the classical style for which he would become renowned. While in London he also worked in the furniture trade but continued to promote himself as a sculptor, even carving a mahogany tray as a wedding gift for Queen Elizabeth.

Marriott returned to Jamaica on the eve of its independence when there was a great deal of interest in replacing colonial European forms with art that better represented a Jamaican aesthetic. Marriot’s talents were immediately commissioned to create busts of all of Jamaica’s recently selected national heroes such as Marcus Garvey and Norman Washington Manley, as well as to create monumental sculptures such as that of Jamaica’s Olympic sprinter Arthur Wint, outside the newly built national stadium. Marriott’s skills were unerring; his talent for capturing the likeness of his sitters whether in wood, clay or bronze made him a popular choice for public commissions. Marriot also became a respected teacher offering his services as a tutor in sculpture to the Jamaica School of Art.

During the 1980s, Marriot contracted Parkinson’s Disease an illness characterized by involuntary shaking that limited his work. Even so, when there was public outcry over the first monument created to commemorate Bob Marley, Marriot was commissioned to sculpt another. His life size figure that depicts Marley, the reggae star in a staid but nevertheless assured representational manner, now stands in Celebrity Park as a testament to the talents of the singer as well Marriot’s skills.

Born in Yorkshire England, Edna Manley’s mother was Jamaican, from the prominent Shearer family. In 1936 she met her cousin Norman Manley who had come to England as a Rhodes scholar to study at Oxford. He was later conscripted and fought in WW1, while Edna studied at St Martin’s School of Art. They married in 1922 and moved to Jamaica where Edna was to pursue her career as a sculptor creating images that reflected Jamaica’s struggle for nationhood. During the 1930’s Edna Manley continued to exhibit in London but increasingly her focus was Jamaica where she exhibited and supported the development of the arts.

Edna Manley’s Negro Aroused (1935) aptly reflects her stylistic and social interests during that era. Hewn intentionally from dark mahogany, its naked black torso supports a head thrust upwards in search of a new dawn. Stylistically, Negro Aroused is linked to William Blake’s romantic imagery of a renovated or resurrected man (Boxer, 1990), but conceptually it wrestles with edenic and primordial thinking closer to the primitivists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Yet, in spite of its idealism, Negro Aroused is a constrained and even pained figure. Even without chains, its movement is frustrated by its rooted akimbo posture, suggesting that the black man’s future is not born out of freedom but an irrevocable recognition of place. Norman Manley considering how the black man might triumph over this adversity wrote:

“...There is a tremendous difference between living in a place and belonging to it and feeling that your own life and destiny is irrevocably bound up in the life and destiny of that place. It is that spirit which is the most hopeful thing in Jamaica today. It is that spirit which alone encourages the development of our national consciousness...”

Sculptures such as Negro Aroused (1936) became icons for this era and much of the work that she created in the run up to Jamaica’s independence such as Into the Sun (1954), Growth (1958) and I Saw My Land (1960) featuring the same heroic black figure, bear this weight of representing the nation’s vision.

Her message promoted black self-dignity, but never at the expense of personal and autobiographical details. The Moses images from the 1950s suggest how her personal and public life were entwined once her husband Norman Manley became Jamaica’s Chief Minister. Edna Manley’s images of the prophet Moses bear strong resemblance to her husband Norman, while the narrative imagery of works like I Saw My Land (1960) boldly signal his role as deliverer of the nation. The designation ‘Moses’ was an appropriate one in a society that saw itself as being freed from bondage and colonialism and set on a path for Independence. As part of her efforts to support the national development Edna taught art classes and helped to establish the Jamaica School of Art and Crafts (1950) through which she influenced later generations of artists. Her husband became Chief Minister of Jamaica in 1954 and although he lost the national elections in 1961, he was instrumental in leading Jamaica to Independence in 1962. Norman Manley died in 1969, but was succeeded by their son Michael who became Prime Minister in 1972. Edna continued to play an active role in cultural development as a founder member of the National Gallery of Jamaica and as one of the countries foremost artists winning numerous awards and national commissions and sculpting an enormous body of work, right up until her death at age 85.

Born in rural in the hills of St Andrew, William ‘Woody’ Joseph’s talent as an artist was not recognized by Jamaica’s art ‘cognicenti’ until fairly late in his life. Initially, within his rural community he was considered something of a curiosity and even accused of Obeah and devil worship by members of his community. In that relatively conservative Christian setting, his sculptures were considered graven images and a challenge to Old Testament biblical traditions. Even in the face of this opposition Woody continued to carve. With no formal training or knowledge of western artistic principles, he was guided by his inner visions that he felt compelled to execute.

The inspiration for Woody’s work was ancestral memory, his images represent archetypal forms that can be linked to an African heritage. Of all the self-taught artists to have emerged in Jamaica, Woody’s work bears the closest resemblance to West African sculptures and it is difficult to account for this striking similarity. His heads, figures, strange totem like fetishes, suggest that they are archetypal images – a vision retained deep within the psyche.Woody approach to his work is also comparable to that of African artistic tradition. Guided by intuition he first selects his wood that is normally cedar (because the rafters of King Solomon’s temple were also made of cedar). Next, he muses on the ‘spirit’ within the wood itself, and he claims that the wood speaks to him as he works. He is merely releasing its hidden spirit. In this way he reveals faces of people, angels and animals distinguished by their their unusual patterns and markings; each one taking on its own character and sense of personage Finally, the work is coloured, sometimes in a logwood bath that gives it a deep burnished tone and that also helps to protect it from termites, at other times its is dyed black and highly polished. The result is minimalistic but nevertheless striking, from small to large each of Woody’s pieces come to life referencing religious and folk imagery of duppies, river maids, kings and queens. It is a hierarchy of images from a time past but not forgotten.

Woody’s work came to the attention of Jamaica’s art world during the 1980s through the support of the National Gallery that has maintained a policy of integrating the work of self taught artists into its national Collection. However, Woody’s work’ that so clearly references Africa, evokes strong emotion from many who are anxious to distance themselves from the experience of slavery and the past. It is for this reason that Woody’s work like that of other intuitives has always been greeted with ambivalence and uncertain patronage. PA-S

The contradiction in Nakazzi’s work is her desire to move away from materiality towards a greater sense of spirituality, and to do this, she sets up a tension between the object and the space around it. Even as she is constructing her characteristically life size figures, she is simultaneously stripping away their body parts, and representing the body in a fragmentary way that hints at the essence of humanity’s flesh and blood forms. Her use of driftwood, twigs, tree bark and other natural materials are deliberate because of their potential for  deterioration and the suggestion of life within and beyond formlessness. The tendency towards transparency witnessed in her more recent works suggest that Nakazzi is developing an even keener sense of reality and transcending the limitations of three dimensional sculpture. 

Khepera Oluyia's work is a powerful mix of the collective and the personal. Through her painting she makes ambitious statements about the ideological systems that seduce, confine and manipulate us in the black diaspora. She challenges these belief systems and provides new models for our consideration and commitment.Jamaica's understanding of political blackness and skin colour are two of her most serious concerns. These are themes she has been exploring since her art school years, combining striking racial portraits with enigmatic titles. Back then, to reinforce her ideas about black strength and dominance, she started using mastic, a black tar substance more usually used for road androof mending. She continues to use mastic in this new series of work, but now she wields its shiny, toffee-like, hot liquid with greater understanding and mastery, sometimes laying it on thick till it cracks, sometimes employing it fluidly so that it creates a 'pollockian' like network of drips and stains.

She cooks this material to make it malleable, working over a coal stove outdoors. Then,  she lays it over metal that she has cut, scraped and battered herself. The combination of heating and forging in the creative process brings to mind  metalwork traditions of African ancestry. And, the connection is correct because Khepera is working with the same spirit of cleansing and renewal closely linked to the West African gods of Shango and Ogun. Against this background of ritualistic vigour and the real possibility of burning herself, she throws herself into her work using her mind’s energy and physical force to render images from these hard hot surfaces. Even as she is doing this, she scours her inner self for deeply hidden imagery shrouded in ‘the darkness’ of the middle passage, slavery, racism, et al. She wills these images to the foreground from their layered entombment. Faces transformed by the fire: dignified visions of the collective self.

Laura Facey is in an enormously productive phase of her work. Recently, she has completed some of the most challenging pieces of her professional life. Spirit Dancer 1999, Earth to Earth 1999, Christ Ascending 2000, Indigo Prayer 2000, and Still Singing 2001 are a group of installations and commisioned works that evidence this surge, all the more remarkable because of their commanding scale and robust physicality. These life size figures with their healthiness have usurped the fragmented body parts and fragile puppet strung forms, that this sculptor sometimes spent months and years honing and refining. Her recent works boldly announce a victory for beauty and vigour over the negative energy that underpinned works such as Goddess of Change 1993. This transformation of output, scale, and content tells the story of a profound shift in Laura Facey's life, productivity and spirituality.

The body, especially the female form, has been a constant in Laura Facey's assemblages. It has been her way of inserting herself into the interior worlds she has explored since childhood. Back then, these worlds were mythical fairyscapes inhabited by Caribbean ghouls and gremlins that echoed a childlike innocence and love of nature. In later years she would act out these fantasies, shunning city life in favour of hunting and fishing trips with her husband to Salt Island, Jamaica, where they had a 'home' with no running water or electricity. Like children of nature they lived primitivelly and instinctively, and Laura used the bones and feathers from the birds they hunted, perhaps believing that they would live on through her work. When personal troubles entered her life, it was this instinct for survival that drove her work. As the backdrop of Salt Island's mangroves and gremlins gave way to pacifying hues of blue and a more inner landscape, the female body, severed and fragile, insinuated itself into her work with increasing persistence.

But looking at Laura Facey's work is always a beautiful experience. Her bodies, despite their mutilation, are perfectly formed and pristine in their presentation. She brings to her exploration of pain, a truth to form, and a personal poetry that makes each piece exquisite. Her tendency to minimalism, means that she only gives the viewer what is essential, and the gesture of the body in all its sadness or wholesomeness, speaks silently and powerfully.

And there is always a tale, because Laura Facey is essentially a story teller as shown in her own children's story Talisman the Goat 1976 and her illustrations for Chairworm and Supershark 1992. Her assemblages harness her earliest experiences in theatre design and her natural tendency to gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork). With these skills she tells us a tale about her life, and her use of found objects, family memorabilia and poetry are the clues she offers for unravelling its mystery. Such exploration of her interior world, motivates works such as Surrender 1997 and Still Singing 2001; works of transformation, that show the body transcending its environment and yielding to a higher form of spirituality. A process the artist describes as "coming out of a fog".

The clarity in Laura Facey's recent works is a sign of her coming to terms with her past, and, reading between the lines of sculpted poetry need no longer be a chilling experience. The exaltation that supports Christ Ascending, or the interior space opened up by the athletic arc of her demeter like form in Earth to Earth tell a new story about renewal in this artist's life; a story of healing.

Educated at the Jamaica School of Art, Margaret Chen left Jamaica after graduating with distinction to pursue post-graduate studies in Canada at York University, Ontario. It was in Canada also that she began her career as a sculptor, exhibiting in a number of Toronto galleries with increasing success. It is significant however that in the 1980s Margaret chose to return to Jamaica for her first solo exhibition at the Upstairs Downstairs Galleries; to establish her studio, and to become a important contributor to group exhibitions locally and Jamaican exhibitions abroad.

Her work, usually large in scale and tending towards installation, is distinguished by her painstaking attention to detail and meticulous finish. These assemblages of natural and man-made materials normally take months and years to come to fruition and as a result her solo exhibitions are rare. Even so, there is continuity as she works from one major work or theme to the next. She says: My work happens as a result of the mysterious interweaving of process and content, the inanimate and animate, matter and spirit. The creative process for me is an on-going and progressive one that builds up layer by layer, work after work.

I cannot sever the past from my present works. Wherever I stand, whatever I do, my history is very much a part of my work, its base lying in the sum total of selected fragments from the past.

More recently she has explained this process in greater detail explaining how one work naturally grows out of another. It is the process that drives her towards new boundaries and revelations. She says:

It is in hindsight that I perceive my work as an ongoing process, an attempt to plumb the depths of that ‘primordial slime from which life first emerged’ and to reveal to oneself again and again, through work after work, the site of one’s own origin.”

© PA-S