Kelley-Ann Lindo
From a very young age I would always go to the waving gallery at the airport to see my family off. I would watch as they went to board the plane and I would try to get their attention by waving and jumping frantically up and down screaming their names. I would shout until they stood at the stairs and waved goodbye signaling their departure. And as the plane doors closed, the feeling of isolation and yet anticipation crept in. And that is how I began to see that space – the open and closed, the happy and sad, the love me and leave me. It became this ritual that ultimately ended.
Home carries with it many meanings. Home triggers memories, sometimes reminding us of painful or happy moments. My ongoing body of work seeks to establish a conversation around the dynamics surrounding home and its meaning – and how absence within that space alters its meaning. My previous investigations explored the dynamics surrounding the barrel children syndrome within the Caribbean culture — a term referring to children who have been left behind by one or both parents who have migrated. The term also reflects the parent’s need to disguise their absence with the provision of material goods and remittance for the children. This body of work raises questions about migration, Caribbean family structure, and material relationships between experience, memory, story and identity.
The material explorations have been a continued range of mixed media from drawing, printing and installation with found objects and video to expand the discourse. My choice of various unconventional mediums have allowed for more expansive exploration of language and image making. Through abstraction, I have absorbed the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice as an act of catharsis. The works reference recognizable form deconstructed to the extent that, meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted.
Kelley-Ann Lindo has been educated at the Edna College of the Visual and Performing Art (BFA in Painting, 2015). She worked as a gallery assistant at the CAGE Gallery, and as a curatorial assistant at the National Gallery of Jamaica all in Kingston, Jamaica. She lectured at the Edna Manley College of the Visual & Performing Arts, and is currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University under a Fulbright Scholarship. She has been artist-in-residence at Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad (2016), at NLS, Kingston, Jamaica (2017) and at Blaqmango Consultancy, Kingston, Jamaica (2018). Her work has also been exhibited at the Barbados Museum & Historical Society (Arrivants Exhibition, 2018), the National Gallery of Jamaica (Jamaica Biennial 2017), Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts (Final Year exhibition, 2015), and the College’s CAG[e] Gallery (2014). Lindo produces large, mixed media installations, but also works in drawing and print media, and in video.