Eye, The Seville Series (1992)

© 2000 Anna Ruth Henriques

Seville Series

“In 1992, I went to Seville, Spain to coordinate the design and installation of the Jamaica Pavillion at the Universal Exposition there which was also planned to coincide with the 500-year celebrations of Columbus' departure from the same said city to the New World. My father's family were Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition which also commenced the year Columbus set sail, 1492. Thus the city as a point of exodus held personal relevance to me.

Meanwhile, I had taken along with me a dozen Jamaican chocolate bars as sustainance during what was originally meant to be a couple weeks in Seville but what ended up as four months. I saved the gold wrappers of those chocolate bars, much like a raven collecting shiny objects. In Spain, I also accumulated amongst my 'treasures' a few coins, and a Portuguese tourist brochure (the Portuguese at first invited the Jews in when Spain was expelling them.) I stuck everything on canvas boards, and as icons - as memorials to an old world where they were started, as celebrations of a new one where they were completed - the Seville Series took form.”

Song of Songs

“I had recently completed the Book of Mechtilde which was based on the Book of Job, as well as the Seville Series which was loosely based on Exodus. The Book of Mechilde had not been printed nor had there been any thought of having it published, so personal was the story and seemingly so irrelevant to anyone else, or so I thought. I had given a color photocopy of the Book of Mechtilde to my grandparents. My grandmother showed it to her brother-in-law who is a well-known art appreciator on the island. She was looking for what she considered an objective opinion to validate her own grandmotherly bias! Anyway, this great-uncle made the necessary nods of approval and the next time he saw me he suggeted I take a good look at the Song of Songs. So I did, and that good look combined with my own experiences gave birth to the suite of paintings.”

Anna Ruth Henriques

The speaking silence of the past beckons.
It wants its stories to be told.
Sometimes it whispers in soft yet salient verse,
sometimes it cries out in deep, dense, heartfelt fervor.
I hear and I answer for it speaks from within.

I make memorials to this past,
to what had or will have been.
My memorials emerge from this world,
borne from the eulogies of language,
the evocations of objects that come to me with meaning.
In my presence, my posession, they become familiar.
At least for the moment, they find a home.

Images intersect texts, textures colliding, colors erupting,
all making themselves heard in the quiet emergence of an earthly form.
This is my art, where with ritualistic abandon
I work the surface to build a future,
in reassembling a past.

For history eludes me.
Though I am a part of it, it is not mine.
It is transient, travelling through time as an echo,
as elusive as the string of spoken words
which people have hurried to inscribe in clay,
paint on parchment, print on paper. In this instance,
these words find their own home in the Biblical texts.
It is these words, the words of my people,
that speak to me as they repeat themselves over and over,
their echo slipping in between the spaces of their written words
- if only to summon a recent recountance, a middle distance,
without losing the resonance of a distant past.

Anna Ruth Henriques

"Behold", Old Testament Themes in Contemporary Caribbean Art
10th November, 2000 - 3rd March, 2001

Using rich textures, jewel-like tones, and iconographic imagery, the Jamaican artist, Anna Ruth Henriques, explores Biblical themes in two bodies of paintings, "Song of Songs" based on the book of the same name, and "Seville Series," excerpted from Exodus. Both bodies of work represent a synthesis of culture - the integration of belief systems, symbolisms, and sensibilities of a multitude of peoples present in the Caribbean. In particular, the pieces refer directly to her Jewish heritage as it exists in a Caribbean setting, "Song of Songs" in quilting together a personal narrative, "The Seville Series" in commemorating the migratory move of the Jewish people from Spain to the New World.

"Behold" was displayed in the InterAmericas Space at CCA7 from November 10th to March 3rd.

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