Emily Anglin
Having had the great fortune and pleasure of following the work of Andil Gosine for a decade now — and permanently benefitting, in mind and in soul, from his generous, intimate, and searing gifts of reflection offered in its many multifaceted forms — when I first saw a photo of his bronze sculpture Ixora Coccinea, I was profoundly moved by its simultaneous effect of expansiveness and distillation. Like the sculpture itself, those two words — Ixora Coccinea — carry so much history and distance: all the travels of the flower around the world alongside people descended from indentured workers forcibly brought to the Caribbean by the British, the histories of violence the flower and the artwork remember, countering all the ways those histories have been flattened and erased. And Gosine’s personal history, inextricably interwoven with the legacy of indenture, that imbues the sculpture is also far-reaching across time and space. The sculpture gathers his memories of working with the flower as a child in Trinidad — threading a needle through their stalks to form garlands presented at Hindu prayer ceremonies — together with his present-day artistic and monumental offering of the same flower, an expression of his wide-ranging and yet also poetically incisive artistic and theoretical vision. The lacquered, reflective surface of the sculpture opens up wide and deep realms of meaning, refracting the ixora’s histories and the flower’s Latin name’s corresponding erasures.
I was reminded, as I considered the effect of Ixora Coccinea, of some of the strikingly concise yet vast word-pairs found in Gosine’s work. Key among these is the profound statement “So what?” following the phrase “We are animals” in his book Nature’s Wild. With these two words, Gosine opens portals to boundless terrains of possibility through the statement’s anti-colonial upending of hierarchical western heteropatriarchal order, and the very structures of thought on which these hierarchies are trained to grow. I also recalled the experience of reading Nature’s Wild, contemplating again and again its concise two-word title’s entanglements of enthralling poetic, political, and ontological significance: the apostrophe in the first word suggesting both a contraction and a possessive, both a refusal and an embrace, and also a distillation drawing the reader into something entirely new and hybrid. An academic book that is also memoir, that also moves in a poetic dimension, a brilliant intellectual contribution that works at affective and visceral as well as cerebral levels.
Ixora Coccinea: proposition for a public monument (2024).
Bronze Sculpture, lit
Above all, as I first looked at Ixora Coccinea, I thought of the expansive and reverberating significances emanating from a childhood photo of Gosine included in the pages of that book, echoed by another childhood photo of Gosine that finds sparkling new dimensions in the work Magna Carta: his generosity, creativity, and self-possession already abundantly clear from his stance, his smile a gift shining across time, reminiscent of the warmth and deep compassion running through all of his work, all his gestures as a writer, artist, and person. I think of this child finding clusters of ixoras among the hedges at the boundaries of yards for making his garlands; I consider the bushes seen at the edges of the Magna Carta photo, marking the presence of the wild that the boy will one day rechart (or perhaps de-chart) as a concept through his anti-colonial, feminist, anti-classist, and anti-racist work, and clearly already does, even at this young age, through his very being; through his lifelong embrace of the liminal, the complex, the playful, and the creative.
As Gosine reminds us through his incorporation of, and his own, poetic language in his work, poetry opens up meaning beyond the realm of words through its concision, skirting the seam between word and silence, as demonstrated powerfully by Khal Torabully’s line, “everything slackens in a wreck.” As Gosine has shown us throughout his career, Torabully’s words call forth vast and devastating colonial histories of violence, but also the possibility and creation that arise out of destruction in the hands of the people who responded to that legacy of violence with reinvention. Torabully’s words become distilled in another profound word-pair, Gosine’s term ‘wrecking work,’ used to conceive of the complex legacy of colonial destruction, focusing on those who answer that destruction with resourceful and creative strategies for survival and new creation. This subtle conceptualization, the focusing in on the beauty that emerges from destruction, though always highlighting and visibilizing rather than hiding violence, recurs throughout his work. So too does Ixora, this single, four-petaled flower with its reflective surface, hold worlds of possibility, centering beauty in creating space for remembrance, refusal, and grief.
Like Gosine’s other work, this sculpture asks questions, eschewing the polemical in favor of reflective, poetic channels of thought. The emotional power of Ixora the sculpture arises from its juxtapositions, being both subtle and fluid in its reflectiveness, and at the same time solid in its heavy bronze form. It slackens the rush to place neat narratives around people and events typical of capitalist progress, like traditional acts of monumentalization. It finds depths in surface, strengths in the small flower’s delicate composition. It is shaped like a star — or, like a star’s light appearing to sparkle as we gaze on it across time and space, showing us not just its sphere but how its fire touches our eye through distance, affecting how we see.
The sculpture’s reflective shine strikes me as embodying the invitation to reflect that characterizes Gosine’s hopeful, intersectional eco-aesthetics, allowing needed room for grief while it perseveres in looking and imagining forward, through authentic inquiry and connection. Nature’s Wild, for example, in its hybrid, blended generic form, showcases his characteristic warm way of sharing his own story in the course of connecting to others, deepening understanding, and always underscoring the ecological crisis we all live in together (albeit with drastically different exposures and risks depending on privilege and position) as an opportunity to be present with each other in better, more authentic ways.
Ixoras
Like the ixora, Gosine’s ways of thinking and working strike me as growing not in singular flowers but in clusters that bloom together. His remarkable curiosity, generosity, and openness yield clusters and collaborations, forming networks among artists, writers, filmmakers, thinkers, activists, and others. On the page, or reflected in his visual work, multiple ideas appear together, each bolstering the others’ significance, covering and exploring more and more expansive ground.
Like the ixora’s habit of branching and growth, its flower-clusters attracting pollinators into its constellations of small flowers, there is something essentially creative and generative about Gosine’s work. Each new project gives rise to new connections. His approach to ideas seeks not to answer but to ask, not to close subjects but to open them, not to survey and categorize, but to uncover and share beauty and new possibilities. As Aruna D’Souza wrote in the New York Times review of the exhibition everything slackens in a wreck that Gosine curated at New York’s Ford Foundation Gallery in 2022, “Gosine’s goal was not to organize a survey of Asian-Caribbean art or an exhibition about indentured servitude. He wanted to find work that embodied the beauty that resulted from these complicated histories of immigration and cultural mixing.” In the Nature’s Wild exhibition Gosine’s work also brings forward and embraces complexity, beauty, and cultural intermingling, through a personal and intimate but also collaborative lens.
The appearance of the single flower in Ixora Coccinea reminds me of a magnified detail, a zooming-in on an element of the ixora shrub’s clusters, a close connection with its beauty. These clusters can make the small individual flowers within them hard to see as their own entity. By showing this one flower fallen from its cluster, the piece gives an opportunity to consider the plant’s function and form: it highlights the simultaneous strength and delicacy of the flower’s four-sided shape, which points in the four directions with a balanced symmetry, but also at a tilt as the sculpture lies on its side, its petals pointing up and diagonally as well as across. It points toward depths, but also upward, toward the stars that were once used by colonizers to chart the waters, and that always gazed down on them as refutations of their self-proclaimed supremacy in the world and universe, if they would only have looked up to reflect instead of to claim. Art, in Gosine’s hands and in the networks of ideas and people that he fosters, exists in constellations; clusters of stars that offer spaces and structures for contemplating other ways of being and coexisting.
