"The Boites de Nuit twinkle like fireflies in her thick hair"

TITLE: ""The Boites de Nuit twinkle like fireflies in her thick hair"
DATE: October 2019
MEDIUM: Green Plastic Coated Fence Wire, Black Telephone Wire, Human Hair

This sculpture was made specifically for the Y Gallery Group Exhibition entitled After. The curators of the exhibition, Yasmin Hadeed, Melanie Archer and Melissa Miller selected a group of artists, gave us the choice of 2 poems to be the starting point for this piece.

This piece is inspired by Derek Walcott’s 1962 poem, Night in the Gardens of Port of Spain. Walcott uses the metaphor of the woman to describe the sensual aspect of night. The darkness awakens our senses of feeling, smell and hearing while our sense of vision is reduced to the binary reading of light and dark, absent of tone and colour.

The nightclub (boites de nuit) reference sparked the image of the go go dancers of the 1960s with their embellished costumes. I used the green fence wire to connote garden imagery and my hair for the tassels and fringe to add the sensual aspect.