Kitchen Bitches and Wicked Witches

I'm sitting here on Mylie McCallum's lovely porch that looks out across the rooftops to the wide expanse of sea here on the north coast of Jamaica, just west of Falmouth and about a half an hour from Montego Bay. After she retired from nursing, Mylie decided to set up a little bed and breakfast in  her home, and it's been a delightful place to say while I've been in the north. No pictures of food just now (but don't worry Katie - there's lots of pictures to come) but I've just inhaled a colorful bowl of banana, watermelon, and papaya and am waiting for the main event. Mylie cooks a great traditional Jamaican breakfast - yesterday it was ackee and salt fish and roasted breadfruit. Yahoo baby. Oh heck, here it is and its so beautiful I can't help myself - salt fish, callaloo, green bananas, and 'bammy' (crisp fried cassava bread). Gorgeous.

  

Alright so back to reporting on the trip - once again I am in awe that I've only been in Jamaica what - five days ??? The conference was fascinating, not just for the official stuff - papers, presentations, etc - but for meeting the students and faculty at the Edna Manley College who were both going about their usual business and also working with performance artists of various kinds.

This is Traci - she's a fourth year student in sculpture who is working towards her BFA thesis exhibition in June and was kind enough to invite me into her studio. She works with welded steel in combination with stretched nylon; fascinating juxtapositions of hard and soft, durable and fragile, and will be incorporating figurative references related to contemporary dance (there's a terrific dance program here as well as visual art). As with pretty much everyone I meet in the Caribbean Traci has an amazing family story, in this case her Chinese grandmother who was born in Jamaica but then suddenly sent to China at the age of five and did not return to Jamaica until she was in her fifties. I really hope I get to see her work again when I come back to Jamaica in April.

Jamaica is the only country in the English-speaking Caribbean with an art museum - the National Gallery of Jamaica. I went to an excellent panel discussion there about their current exhibition, titled 'New Roots' and displaying the work of ten young Jamaican artists, most of whom were connected to the Manley College in some way. I've been to the National Gallery several times before, but have never seen it like this - they turned over the main entry galleries to an eye-popping graffiti/pop art/interactive project, and the additional galleries highlighted video projects, photography, wearable sculptures, and several different approaches to drawings. Fascinating.

Back at the College I was fortunate to catch up with David Dunn and Norma Harrack, ceramic artists and faculty in the program, and I'm hoping to come back here for a few days in April to fire pots with them before the woodfiring workshop that is my primary purpose for that trip. 

The official business of the conference would up on Friday evening with a closing ceremony complete with lively drumming, and then you could choose between a dance or drama performance; I went to the dance it and was really great - 8 or so different dance pieces, highlighted by the amazing work of the Jamaican National Dance Theatre Company that Rex Nettleford founded. Awesome way to finish the conference.

Saturday morning I took a deep breath and went to the rental car company around the corner, checked out of my hotel, and took off to brave the Jamaican roads. On the way out of Kingston I was looking for a potter who sells along the Barbican Road; didn't find him but did find a young man selling garden pots on the Constant Spring Road so I stopped to chat.

 

And once again was blessed by the guardian angel of ceramic researchers - the photo on the right above is one I took in 1998 when I was able to document the 'walkaround style' potters in Trenchtown. I'm set up to go again on Tuesday but wasn't sure if I could find the same people. Well, the young boy on the in the photograph with Mrs. Pearl Richards in 98 turned out to be the same young man selling the pots on Constant Spring Road (and I did get him to smile eventually). We had a great conversation, I showed him all my pictures, and he's going to let folks know that I'll be there on Tuesday. Magic.

Nobody was kidding when they said that the road I was taking to visit Belva and Donald Johnson in Clonmel was...challenging. Very narrow, very twisty winding, no verge at all - cliff on one side, drop on the other. But no problem mon, I got there a bit late but got there fine and Belva and Donald were just wonderful. They trained with the celebrated Cecil Baugh (very long story, won't go into it, suffice to say that he was first trained by potters like the flower pot makers, went on to serve in WW2, worked with Bernard Leach in England, and founded both the contemporary ceramics movement in Jamaica and the ceramics program now at the Edna Manley College). The Johnsons have been making a living making pots for more than thirty years; I had met them briefly before but never visited the studio so it was a real treat to spend time there and hear their stories.

 

Donald is an amazing technician - he and Belva have built all their own kilns and equipment, and now make most of their work with slip casting from original models and molds. This level of efficiency allows them to fill large orders for hotels, gift shops, and local organizations, and they make a wide range of functional, decorative, and expressive forms. On the right are two examples of their version of the 'kitchen bitch', which is a traditional handheld kerosene lamp previously made out of tin or converted cans and used to light the way out to the kitchen house to start the cooking in the dark wee hours of the morning. Love the name - they sell these to the gift shop at the national Institute of Jamaica but I told them that they should make up a label to tell the story cause what American tourist wouldn't want to buy a pot called a 'kitchen bitch' ?!?!

I said my goodbyes to the Johnsons and made my way out of the country and up to the long north coast road which is dominated by the huge tourist complexes at Ocho Rios and Montego Bay; it took some doing to find my little guesthouse in the dark but after a few phone calls Roma drove down and led me back up the hill. Note to self and others - don't drive in the dark in Jamaica, for all kinds of reasons. But its really just fine in the day, and yesterday morning I had no trouble following David Pinto's excellent online directions up to his fabulous studio on the Good Hope Estate above Falmouth. I was here two years ago with my friend Tina Spiro, and will be coming back in April for the intensive woodfiring workshop that he does almost every year with Doug Casebeer from the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado.

David makes wonderful, wonderful pots and figurative sculpture, and I'm REALLY looking forward to coming back here to actually just work in the studio. Irena Alphonse from St. Lucia will be coming as well; should be a fascinating time. David and I spent several hours talking about ceramics and Jamaica and his own incredibly interesting family history, and I am so grateful for the time he and his wife and little son Oscar spent with me.

I rounded out the day with a visit to Rose Hall near Montego Bay, one of only fifteen plantation great houses out of 700 to survive the island wide destruction of the late slave rebellions. In fact, tho, because of its peculiar history it lay abandoned for 130 years until an American couple bought the limestone shell of the house and 5000 of the 6000 acres of the estate (much of which is now hotels and golf courses). They spent a fabulous amount of money restoring the great house to its former grandeur, complete with a full complement of period furnishings from the 18th and 19th centuries. But the reason the place survived at all is because of fear of the curse of the White Witch of Rose Hall, Annie Palmer, a 19 year old English-Irish 5' tall jezebel who married and murdered the owner, and went on to marry and murder two more husbands. All of this was apparently documented by her bookkeeper whose girlfriend she pushed off the second floor balcony to her death. But that girl's grandfather, a freed slave, then murdered Annie in her bed in retribution. Goodness. So there's lots of ghost stories and gloom and doom about the place; Johnny Cash had an estate down the road and he wrote a song about her - it's worth a listen, I heard a lovely rendition of it from my tour guide as we stood next to the tomb built for Annie by the Americans when her bones were discovered during the renovation of the property.

Oh dear - it's ten o'clock and I need to be in Spanish Town by 1:00 so off I go down the highways and byways of Jamaica. I'm going to see Marlene Roden - Munchie to everyone - who makes beautiful traditional pots like the one above from David Pinto's collection. More later !