Art and the Individual: Bernadette Persaud

Activity: Public Lecture
Date: Thursday 29th March 2018
Host: Moray House Trust

Rainforest (Bernadette Persaud)

Moray House Trust extends warm thanks to Bernadette Persaud for a most enlightening talk about her work. For the benefit of those unable to attend, we reproduce a few words from Ameena Gafoor, Editor of The Arts Journal, who was kind enough to chair proceedings:

“In today’s world, we’re saturated with mundane things, like signing bonus, and oil and gas, and propaganda, or whatever is the hype of the moment, and not enough of the elements that cause a society to cohere. We, therefore, must thank Moray House for allowing the space and time for serious art. David de Caires had been an early admirer/supporter of Bernadette Persaud’s art.

Bernadette Persaud, in the four decades that she’s been pursuing an artistic life, has gathered such recognition and stature, in and out of her homeland, that she needs little or no introduction now.

In Guyana and the Caribbean region, in general, the mainstream of art has historically been located along the trajectory of the Trans-Atlantic European enterprise of slavery and colonialism. As such, the many and various movements of European Art—from the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Neo-classical to the varied isms of Modernism and Post-modernism – have found strong echoes in the Colonial, post-colonial and Neo-colonial art of the Region.

But the art of the region has not always been an art of accommodation and mimicry. From the colonial, and through the post-colonial period, distinctive strands of visual culture, espousing alternative aesthetic and non-European ideologies, can be traced. It is within the currents of resistance and repudiation or rejection of European aestheticism that the art of Bernadette Persaud can be located.

From 1980, with her Botanical Garden series, Persaud started “painting back” as we would say of a writer who “writes back” to Empire. In fact, beneath the surface beauty of her Garden paintings are very political statements as you shall shortly see. Through the years, Persaud has created no less than ten series, the most recent being the astounding Rainforest series, while her themes have evolved elemental issues ranging from the political, to concerns of identity, to the metaphysical.”

The video of this talk is available at: https://youtu.be/iICrYqWb3bE