Mary Madeleine McCarroll

How can the wisdom of the past help us to truly understand ourselves? ‘Lost and Giddy’ is a multimedia performance based installation where I explore the deep implications of colonialism, examining the erasure of cultural heritage and indigenous traditions, and its effects on our identity.

The use of blackboards as pedagogical instruments, subverts traditional educational paradigms. The knowledge depicted on the boards transcends intellectual understanding, embracing traditional African epistemology to reveal intuitive indigenous spiritual wisdom.

I consider spirituality a potent means for both socio-cultural resistance and the preservation of cultural identity. Through my sculptures of Douens drawn from Caribbean folklore, these melancholic yet whimsical figures with their backward feet, symbolise the enduring spirit of loss inflicted by colonialism. Blending the physical and metaphysical, my work uses dark space as an allusion to the role of our psyche in understanding what hides in the dark recesses of our collective unconscious, aiming to encourage true liberation and revival within both individuals and society.