joscelyn gardner

Joscelyn Gardner works across media in the fields of film / video installation, sound, printmaking (stone lithography, intaglio, digital processes), and text works, with increasing interest in alchemical processes which stem from engaging with the natural world. Using a postcolonial feminist methodology informed by (radical) empathy and an intersectional lens, she aims to rupture patriarchal or colonial versions of Anglo-Caribbean history found in the archives by subverting 18th and 19th century European pictorial conventions and methods of documentation through contemporary appropriation / interventionist strategies. She is particularly interested in collaborative survival / resistance modes within colonial systems of power and abuse; in relationships across difference, kinship, and interdependence; as well as in listening to ghosts in the interest of forming new and equitable societies. Recognizing herself as an 'implicated subject' in relation to West Indian plantation slavery, owing to her (white Creole) family history in Barbados that dates from the 17th century, she retrieves atrocities that lie buried in our collective memory in order to reconcile the past with the present and move towards a metaphorical healing of historical wounds and a future in which radical reciprocity and care are centred.