Caribbean Beat — September/October 2019 (#159)

Detail of installation Notebook of No Return,
Alice & Goliath (painting on tapestry, wooden
bench, and fabric knots on wall, 2019)
Mary, in an email interview translated from her native French. “I could also
spend hours and hours colouring. My mother liked working directly with cloth:
she was a seamstress, and I think I inherited this hands-on approach from her.”
One of her grandfathers was a Hindu priest. All her grandparents followed
both Hinduism and Catholicism, as many Indian families did in Guadeloupe,
says Sinnapah Mary, but her own parents became Jehovah’s Witnesses and
were uninterested in Indian diaspora issues. As Sinnapah Mary grew up, she
gradually realised that both Afro- and Indo-Caribbeans are victims of a terrible
uprooting, and this consciousness would help shape her future art.
Her artworks today involve subtle or graphic statements and visual
stories that can be a bit like puzzles or riddles: you have to experience
them and take the time to decode them. That is not to say that many
of her pieces don’t have an immediate visceral power: just look at the animal-
As Kelly Sinnapah Mary grew up, she
realised that both Afro- and Indo-
Caribbeans are victims of a terrible
uprooting, and this consciousness would
help shape her future art
istic image of a hairy mother cradling a newborn
(a photo-drawing collage from Hot Milk 2), which
seems bestially primeval, or the macabre images
of a long-haired, faceless woman with a huge redcushioned
open maw where her face should be, part
of the 2013–14 Vagina installation.
The scary Vagina woman-monster-mouth
image may remind some people of the 1990s
X-Files character the Flukeman, a genetic humanworm
mutant who evolved from human pollution,
living in sewers and eating people to survive and
breed. Sinnapah Mary succeeds in creating her
own unique interpretation of the monstrous: a
cushioned red mouth orifice suggests both the
vulnerability of female apertures and the dangers
of woman unleashed, who may swallow you whole
if you’re not careful.
What inspired that red-mouthed figure was
Sinnapah Mary’s deeply felt reaction to the brutal
2012 gang rape and death of a twenty-three-yearold
woman named Jyoti Singh Pandey by a gang of
men on a bus in Delhi, which made international
headlines and sparked public protests in India
58 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM