Portia Subran gets personal with The Hollows

HASSAN ALI

IT can be difficult to imagine that a bird pecking at one’s belly could be a good thing. For some, the former sentence conjures the image of Prometheus’ mythic punishment – chained to a rock where birds would eat away at his innards for the rest of his immortal life.

Portia Subran, a 36-year-old artist and short-story writer from Chaguanas, offers her own imagination of this feast in her first solo exhibition, The Hollows.

Corbeau Belly, one of the first pieces in the show features a nude woman whose belly has been split open. Four corbeaux peck at her loose, stringy innards while she looks indifferently into the distance with her arms raised behind her head. A fifth corbeau floats above her head. At the bottom of the image, corbeaux skulls rest in a pile. The exhibition text notes that Subran a lot of the work within the show had been motivated by her illness.

Subran requested that the full nature of her illness remain undisclosed but shared with Newsday that she has a connective tissue disorder which causes chronic inflammation, swelling, and pain – all while making her more susceptible to infection.

Returning to Corbeau Belly, it can be tempting, with this biographical context, to say that these corbeaux are representations of her illness tearing her apart; that the figure’s indifference in the painting is representative of resignation to illness. However, Subran shares that she feels the corbeaux can also be a cleansing force rather than one which simply culls and troubles.

At the artist talk for the exhibition on June 28, Subran told Shivanee Ramlochan, TT poet and host of the talk, that Corbeau Belly featured these corbeaux pecking at the woman’s innards as a means of cleaning out the sick parts of her body. She cites the ecological significance of corbeaux, and other carrion birds, in the removal of dead flesh from the environment which in turn prevents disease.

Next to Corbeau Belly, My Womb is a Blessing – Coffin features a pelvic bone which with a corbeau in front of it. The corbeau, which has a red halo, is standing on a pile of skulls nestled within the pelvis. Coffin’s twin piece, My Womb is a Blessing – Cradle features another pelvic bone – this time adorned with plants and crowned with a golden halo.

Subran offers a juxtaposition of the perception of women’s bodies – specifically through their reproductive capacity. In Coffin, the corbeau stands in the middle of the pelvic bone, seemingly hungry for more flesh. In the extreme, one may imagine that this pelvic bone and the skulls beneath it were all related – specifically, that these skulls may have been miscarriages. It’s a demonstration of a failure of the woman’s body to serve its reproductive functions as society.

One may also imagine this corbeau as a critic – one who attacks a woman for miscarriages or having a child out of wedlock – anxiously waiting to caw harshly at the one feeding it.
The exhibition centres women. Most of the subjects are either woman, bird or plant – some, are all three. Subran sees the land as highly important to the survival and safekeeping of all TT people.

Some of the fauna featured in the show include: cocoa, tannia and coffee, to name a few. When she initially sought treatment for her illness, Subran found that she was resistant the antibiotics available to her. After being told by her doctor that she would be unable to get the antibiotics which could help her in TT, Subran took the opportunity to turn to traditional medicine and return to agriculture.

Subran says her father was a “weekend farmer.” She also says that she would be teased in school when she told her classmates about digging yam or playing on the land. Years later, she believes that it is the natural medicine found on the land which has helped her to deal with her illness and keep moving forward as an artist.

Sacred Cacao imagines the cocoa plant as a sort of saintly figure wrapped in a golden halo. Around it, other plants proliferate and beams of light extend outward. The Medicinal Miniatures feature various plants which Subran would have consumed as self-medication.

Fundamentally, these pieces hope to communicate the magic of our local fauna and reify them. Subran says that it is particularly important to do this now because our relationship with our land, since colonialism, has been incredibly damaged.

Queen of the Terroir and Cocoa Woman both place women directly within the agricultural landscape. Queen of the Terroir features a woman, wreathed in peacocks and swathed by various leaves, with blank eyes and her mouth agape.

Cocoa Woman features a crouching woman whose head splits into the branches of a cocoa tree. Subran told Newsday that the cocoa trees throughout the exhibition are drawn from reference images of trees with 100+ years of life behind them.

By placing women within the land, Subran is contrasting them with these same ancient plants. Similarly to the ways in which these plants have been silently living on the land and enriching it, women have done the same. Subran was one of the collaborators in Dr Gabrielle Hosein’s The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture which also aimed to foreground the silent contributions of women to TT culture and history.

Oftentimes, when one hears about field work (enslaved, indentured or free and contemporary), one may picture something like Samuel Selvon’s Cane Is Bitter: a scene of men toiling with cutlasses under the long eye of the midday sun. However, women have always been present. Regarding the word terroir: farmers and wine-lovers will be intimately familiar with it.

Summarily, the terroir refers to the natural conditions around a plant which affect its taste. For example, the French famously say there is no champagne wine outside of the Champagne region of France.

In addition to the 40 plus pieces in the exhibition, Subran also premiered The Shrouds, a wearable collection of Subran’s art. Subran says that she is a T-shirt collector and always wanted to put her own art on a T-shirt. She says that T-shirts help bring art into the world – make it accessible.

With The Shrouds, she’s accomplished her goal. To do so, she enlisted the assistance of stylist, creative director, and her friend, Renelle Wilson. Wilson provided direction for the short film used to promote these shirts (which was screened on the day of the artist talk), styled models for the both video and picture shoots, designed the bouquets laid out at the exhibition, and curated the placement and presentation of the wearable art in the exhibition.

Wilson said that her role as a stylist and creative director is to understand her client’s (in this case, friend’s) aesthetic sensibilities and personality so that she can help them elevate their expression of both to the highest pedigree.

Subran and Wilson both send their gratitude to Olajuwon Scott (photographer), the Milne family at Bethany Estate (where the short film was shot), Jemuel Romeo (videographer and editor), Tenille Ward-Maharaj (editor), Mikhail Gibbings (composer), Dominic Davis (model), Sherezz Grant (model), Gabrielle Bedeaux (curator at Arnim’s), and Shivanee Ramlochan for their respective roles in bringing this show to life.

The Hollows opened on June 27 and will continue until July 11. Anyone interested in experiencing the exhibition can go to Arnim’s on the corner of Tragarete Road and Cipriani Boulevard during gallery hours.

Subran‘s work has received such prestigious placements and awards as the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean Region in 2024. Her art, besides The Hollows, was also recently featured in the group show All of We, is We in Truth which was held at the Central Bank Museum.

Wilson is a stylist and creative director. She styled and directed for The Cloth, Idlewood Bespoke, Erphaan Alves and Muhammad Muwakil of Freetown Collective.