"As Poets Love The Poetry That Kills Them". Fine Silver, Enamel, Embroidery Thread. 2018

"As Drowned Sailors The Sea". Sterling Silver. 2018

Although there are many aspects of my country which I deplore, it was necessary that I made a piece that showed my belief that Trinidad & Tobago is a home worth celebrating and improving. Since colonisation, there has been an inferiority complex that has insidiously lurked in our DNA as a nation. We look up to those who have made it outside of our country, while believing that anything local is of a lower quality or even something to be ashamed of. 

Derek Walcott was a St. Lucian poet, writer and playwright that spent a lot of his time living in and writing about Trinidad. In his poetry he displayed aspects of Trinidadian life and even often wrote in our dialect. In 1992 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature — a man who was born and educated in the Caribbean and wrote about it. A man who was given one of the highest literary honours even though he peppered his writing with what we were always told was “bad English”. In his poem The Schooner, Flight he compares poetry to sailing and says “when I write this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt; I go draw and knot every line as tight as the ropes in this rigging; in simple speech my common language go the wind”. My first necklace is minimal in nature, to mirror our “simple speech”.

I named the sister necklaces after a line in the same poem which talks about his love for Trinidad: “I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea”.

The the second of the pair displays flowers that are native to Trinidad, also preaching appreciation and celebration for what is local. All the flowers stem from the heart, depicting first the white flowers from the colonizing Europe slowly turning into red local flora like anthuriums, the balisae and in the center, our national flower the chaconia. Acknowledging our past, but celebrating our present. 

Photography by Rob Chron