Jasmine Togo-Brisby: Liquid Land art review – Attention to ancestry
Jasmine Togo-Brisby confronts legacies of slavery and generational trauma in this moving and meditative exhibition
‘As Australian South Sea Islanders, we cannot always trace our lineage back to our specific ancestral islands,’ notes Jasmine Togo-Brisby in an artist’s statement accompanying her Gallery Of Modern Art show Liquid Land. ‘We do, however, always hold the knowledge of the sugar industry as our origins.’ She is referring here to the process of blackbirding, whereby South Sea Islanders were kidnapped and taken to work on sugarcane plantations in Australia across the second half of the 19th century (sometimes based on decisions made in the Royal Exchange building which now houses Goma).
Liquid Land is an elegant, affecting and compact sequence of works, built around the central edifice of an ancestral hut. This life-sized replica shack, constructed from wood and rusted steel, is an impressionistic rendering of the first home built by the artist’s great-great-grandmother in Australia, after she herself was blackbirded (picked up from a beach in Vanuatu and set to work as a house slave). A large-scale transfer of a family photograph on the near gable end recreates the entranceway and straw-filled wall cavities. Inside, a steel washtub of treacle sits beneath a chandelier, symbols of opulence and the exploitation which sustained it.
Beyond the hut, a beautiful floor-based assemblage, primarily consisting of crows’ feathers, gives the look of seaweed strands flattened and shaped by a receding tide. Indeed, the mood of this exhibition, set in sultry gloom, is one of aesthetic intrigue and even womb-like cosiness as much as moral and emotional darkness. A vat of molasses in the entrance foyer offers a complementary, befuddling scent of sugar. ‘The plantation was (and still is) a place of contradiction,’ Togo-Brisby notes, ‘a place of confinement and violence, but also the site where our community and families were forged.’ Liquid Land captures this tension with lithe and effective simplicity.
Jasmine Togo-Brisby: Liquid Land, Gallery Of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Sunday 6 September.