As I’ve continued looking through my old prints and refashioning them, I came upon another linocut I made in the 1970s that I called Roots and Ruins. This is a scene from my visits to the Virgin Islands years ago. A favourite site of mine was a place, now wooded, which had once held a plantation. This old plantation wall had been taken over by the forest with trees rooting and growing out of stone.
This was a haunting site, a reminder of the enslavement of people to cultivate sugar cane and their uprising to free themselves.
Seeing the print again, I did not want to cut into it as I’ve done with other prints. Instead I left it whole and folded and sewed it. I added a bit of colour and sent it off to a friend as a surprise mail art booklet.
Arts of May 