The Other Side of Paradise
"There's some vague horror
Inside the unchristened bush."
Derek Walcott
Here in England, countryside is identity. It’s an escape from the dense cities and it bleats with the sound of farming and the ideal of bucolic idylls.
But in the Caribbean, escape from the hot city is toward the even hotter beach. West Indian life is contained and constrained between city and shore. In Trinidad (and Jamaica), to go inland is to adventure into a place where the wet green leaves teem with the terrors of African Shango reshaped with Catholic hell-fires, old French myths of vampires and werewolves...even mysterious Indian gods. In there live the jumbies, the duppies waiting to get you.
Such beliefs were a good enough way to keep the slaves on the plantations, away from the hidden sanctuaries of trees. These were not a place to escape to but rather to escape from. Better the master’s lash than the lick of the lagahoo. And even now, few ever venture there. They may linger at the edges of the darkness, on the banks of fast flowing rivers. But who would go deeper in? The forest lives on in the mind, where the jumbies of our lives are still waiting to get us. Hide.
Something Moves in the Shaking Trees
Linocut
Image: 45cm X 45cm. Paper Size 56cm X 70cm
Edition of 10
Unframed £200. Framed £250
Inside the Unchristened Bush (Dyptich)
Linocut
Image: 64cm X 31cm. Paper size: 76cm X 58cm
Edition of 10
Unframed £250.
Also available as individual prints
Inside the Unchristened Bush (1)
Linocut
Image: 31cmX31cm. Paper size: 47cm X 56cm
Edition of 10
Unframed £150. Framed £195
Inside the Unchristened Bush (II)
Linocut
Image: 31cmX31cm. Paper size: 47cm X 56cm
Edition of 10
Unframed £150. Framed £195
Heading 1
Soucouyant
The old hag, the witch, the shape shifter. In the dead of the night, she seeks her victims by slithering out of her human skin (which she'll hide in a barrel deep in the folds of the forest) into a swirling ball of fire. Those shooting stars you see at night. Make sure it isn;t her swooping into your darkness. Then she'll shape shift through the crevices of your door and turn into a vampire woman to suck your blood. Scatter rice in from of your door and that'll trap her. She'll have to count every grain until the sun sneaks over the horizon thence to flee back to her skin.
Or you can seek out her hidden skin and cover it with salt. That'll kill her.
No one who's tried this aproach has lived to tell the tale
Soucouyant
Linocut
Image: 31cmX31cm. Paper size: 47cm X 56cm
Edition of 10
Unframed £150. Framed £195
Douennes
Babies really. In the forests at night, you can hear them cry. Poor things. You really want to rush out, find them and bring them to safety. Well, that'll be the end of you.
Babies they may be. But they're all dead. Unbaptised. Zombie children. Waiting for those good Samaritans...soon to be dead Samaritans. So when you hear those cries in the night, turn over, go back to sleep.
Just ensure the rice has been scattered where it should.
The Lagahoo
This is a version of the werewolf. A normal person by day and a demon at night...usually a wolf or maybe a goat or a pig. His choice. It carrys a coffin on its shoulders. On the top of this coffin, there are three forever lit candles.. This casket and these candles await your corpse or, not being undeuly fussy, that of any passing animal will do. To defeat it, you must find a sturdy staff and anoint it for nine days with holy water and holy oil and then beat the creature to death.
Write your will before
Same price etc as the rest
Papa Bois
The old protector of the forest, hidden somewhere in the wet green shadows, hiding his cloven feet, shape shifting into a fattened deer, the object of the eager hunt. If you see the deer, turn back. The greedy will be lured deeper and deeper into a place from which there is no return and where he waits patiently somewhere in the rustling leaves. The poet, Derek Walcott said, “We have done things to nature in our time. The victims may be missing, but not the crime.”
Papa Bois
Linocut
Image: 31cmX31cm. Paper size: 47cm X 56cm
Edition of 10
Unframed £150. Framed £195
Mama Glow
From ‘maman de l’eau’, the mother of water, she is part woman, part snake. She is both Eve and the serpent…the coiled union of the tempted and the tempter, snaking its way past the menacing mangroves into some horned man’s memory of a past or future cuckolding…the anima of all his fears. There’s no escape from this bacchanal woman. If she is your latest squeeze, you’ll soon be her latest stiff.
Mama Glow
Linocut
Image: 31cmX31cm. Paper size: 47cm X 56cm
Edition of 10