These images are from my MFA thesis exhibit for the Sculpture and Expanded Media program at Kent State University. The exhibition titled the Romantic Caribbean was installed at the CVA Gallery at Kent State University on 21 March-27 March 2021.

As a person born and partially raised on a small island in the English-speaking Caribbean, I have grown interested in investigating ideas around identity politics and cultural exchange within my visual art practice. My interests have led me to focus on the subjects of tourism and trade within my current research. One purpose of my current research is to expose commonplace representations of island culture that were created from fantasies of the romantic Caribbean destination. I want to reveal how particular representations encouraged leisure activities and oftentimes promiscuous behavior from tourists. Another purpose of my research is to show how fantasy images survive through tourist advertisement strategies, keepsake items, and film. I want my research to engage in discussion about how tourist exchanges, between Western cultures and the cultures on Caribbean islands, create systems of cross-pollination. Systems that influence cultures of varying distances to share aesthetics by trading items and trading images that they associate with value and beauty.

The artworks within this exhibit incorporate found materials made of ceramic, dried flowers, dried grass, metal, plaster, wood, and wax. All these materials I gather from specified locations. Most recently, I have been gathering found materials from my place of residence, which is Ohio, USA. I also use other elements within my current visual art practice. I make hand-built ceramic fragments, plaster casts, surface decals, and overglazes. These elements are edited with found materials to make mixed media trophies. The trophies are decorative items with simple functional purposes. For my thesis exhibit, the functional purpose of the trophies was to serve as holders or containers for candles, cigarillos, and incense.

In addition to my sculptural objects, I use collected screenshots from the 1974 romantic thriller movie, The Tamarind Seed, and I use collected images from my international travel to different countries. The supplementary digital elements are turned into banners, graphics, and video projections. For my thesis exhibit, these digital elements were placed around my trophies to create installations. My choice to place banners, graphics, and videos in conjunction with the trophies is a technique inspired by an advertisement strategy. The technique is used at duty-free shops on my home island, Grand Cayman. The shops will display valuable items like Rolex watches in storefront windows and place plastic banners outside the store that show celebrities like George Clooney or Keira Knightley wearing the jewelry. This advertisement technique was created to build credibility and expose the jewelry to new markets. For my trophies, this mimicked technique of digital media creates credibility through a sense of historical authenticity of my newly manufactured objects, and it exposes the objects to new viewers by their association with the digital media. Further, the trophies in conjunction with the digital media illustrate ideas about how cultural identity can hybridize through the influence of exchange systems like tourism, and they illustrate how keepsake items will create complex narratives about the travel destinations they are associated with versus the manufactured and collected locations of the materials.

Colonial Debris is an ongoing series of work that I started in 2022. I created a new installation for the series during the In Relations exhibit that opened at Tern Gallery in February 2024.

The Colonial Debris installation shares images of 7 different created icons- the Priest, the Black Angels, the Columns, the Torsos, the Banker, the Mahogany, and the Drummer. Each image is made from hand drawing and hand painting. I complete each image by placing a final layer of graphite screen print on top of the paintings. The whole process of making these new images references hand-painted photographs that were previously used for tourist postcards. Each figure made within this series has become one of my new icons for the Caribbean region, thinking about new icons that can emerge from the colonial debris.

“The In Relation exhibit at Tern Gallery was a group exhibit featuring Caribbean artists, Gherdai Hassell, Simon Tatum, and Drew Weech. It brought together three practices from the Anglophone Caribbean to illuminate intimacy within the personal and the political.” -Jodi Minnis.

Artworks from the Colonial Debris series are now available for purchase with Tern Gallery. If you are interested in finding out more details, reach out to them directly (link: https://www.terngallery.com/projects-with/simon-tatum).

The artwork in this series was inspired by my graduate thesis research and its investigation into tantalizing ideas of a Caribbean fantasy destination. The artworks take the form of archival inkjet prints on paper, designed through both analog and digital methods of image layering and registration. The content for the posters references printed pamphlets that were commissioned by hotels in Grand Cayman in the 1960s and 1970s from a Miami-based advertisement company. These pamphlets were made during the first major tourist influx in Grand Cayman and were important tools for attracting tourists to the island for vacation getaways.

As I have made these prints, I have chosen to combine elements scanned from the original 1960s and 1970s tourist pamphlets for Grand Cayman with other visual elements. Elements I have collected from other printed materials like books, magazines (like National Geographic), etc. The imagery I sourced for the first set of posters ( titled: “Ancient Charm with Modern Convenience” and “See Your Travel Agent”) includes tropical vegetation from contemporary tourist magazines for Grand Cayman, Spanish and Catalan ceramics from museum catalogs, and a fragment of a portrait bust from an Oceanic culture (also collected from a museum catalog). The second set of prints ( titled: “Winter Haven Homes” and “Buccaneers Inn”) incorporate an alternate arrangement of visual elements. They include snippets from 1970s National Geographic articles covering islands in the Caribbean, African Nations, and Central and South American nations. I chose snippets from articles that focused on the poverty and “re-development” of these nations and juxtaposed them with other snippets from advertisements in the same National Geographic magazine. Snippets from advertisements for luxury home renovations, home insurance, luxury vehicles, collectible coins, and Caribbean resorts.

Image 1: “Ancient Charm with Modern Convenience”, 2021. Archival inkjet print on paper.

Image 2: “See Your Travel Agent”, 2019. Archival inkjet print on paper.

Image 3: “Ancient Charm with Modern Convenience”, 2021. Digital collage printed on archival paper, framed. 50x 38 in or 127 x 98 cm.

Image 4: “ See Your Travel Agent”, 2019. Digital collage printed on archival paper, framed. 50x 38 in or 127 x 98 cm.

Image 5: Image of “Ancient Charm with Modern Convenience” and “See Your Travel Agent” hung in the permanent collection of the Ritz Carlton, Grand Cayman.

Image 6: “Winter Haven”, 2022. Archival inkjet print on paper.

Image 7: “Buccaneers Inn”, 2022. Archival inkjet print on paper.

Image 8: “Winter Haven” and “Buccaneers Inn” printed and mounted in Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Image courtesy of Kriston Chen.

Colonial Debris is an ongoing series of work that I started in 2022. I created new prints on paper for the series during the In Relations exhibit that opened at Tern Gallery in February 2024. The new prints on paper are titled “The Musicians”.

The Colonial Debris series shares images of different created icons- the Priest, the Black Angels, the Columns, the Torsos, the Banker, the Mahogany, the Drummer, and the Musicians. The Musicians are archival inkjet prints on paper that aredesigned from images I have taken from collected figurines, combined with designed backgrounds made by disassembling and reassembling scans of old tourist advertisements and documentary imagery of the Cayman Islands (my place of birth). One of the Musician figurines is a black plastic cherub who plays the viola. The other Musician figurine is a pair of wooden men playing the bagpipes. Both types of musicians allude to the musical tools of European cultures that werebrought into the Caribbean region.

Each figure made through this process has become one of my new icons for the Caribbean region, thinking about new icons that can emerge from the colonial debris. The Musicians are archival inkjet prints placed on Hahnemuhle paper; each print is 20 x 30 inches ( 51 x 76 cm).

Also included with the prints is a ceramic sculpture with gold luster titled “The Music Player”. The ceramic sculpture contains a mini Bluetooth speaker inside of it that plays an audio track on a loop. The audio was made by my collaborator and Nashville-based audio producer, Haru Sayso. The title of the audio track is titled “All I Need”.

“The In Relation exhibit at Tern Gallery was a group exhibit featuring Caribbean artists, Gherdai Hassell, Simon Tatum, and Drew Weech. It brought together three practices from the Anglophone Caribbean to illuminate intimacy within the personal and the political. Each artist grounds their work in personal anecdotes that push their audience to the ever-present politics of our existence within the Global North; however, they allow tenderness and intimacy to remain in place. “In Relation” gave breath to this dichotomy.” -Jodi Minnis.

Artworks from the Colonial Debris series are now available for purchase with Tern Gallery. If you are interested in finding out more details, reach out to them directly (link: https://www.terngallery.com/exhibitions/in-relation ).

The Seven Travelers audio and video series (2022) is a recent collaborative project between Nashville-based rapper and music producer, Haru Sayso and Simon Tatum. The project is a series of audio and video narratives that have beencombined to create a short visual album. The audios created by Haru Sayso were responses to a self-given prompt “What is under the ocean”. A prompt that follows Sayso’s continued interest in people finding personal truth through journeys and self-reflection. Sayso’s audios are layered beats that try to provoke a sense of departure from one place to another, orone mental state to another, or from one emotional state to another. Following Sayso’s concept, Simon Tatum created video narratives that speak about the self-reflections of seven travelers. These narratives are partly inspired by stories told to Tatum by elderly family members, and partly inspired by Caribbean-based films from the 1970s like The Harder They Come and The Tamarind Seed.

My interests are closely linked with my background as an individual who was born and partially raised in Grand Cayman, a small island in the English-speaking Caribbean. My interests have led me to use a process of drawing that transforms found materials like decorative ceramic plates. The process involves transferring my hand-drawn sketches into overglaze gold graphics through digitally manipulated vinyl decals. I intended to transform the decorative plates within my drawing process to appropriate a found material that is commonly associated with keepsake items.

With the drawing compositions, I have focused on depictions of male characters shown in intimate moments or moments of self-reflection. These depictions of males are accompanied by the existing graphics of flowers that are on the decorative plates, making my drawn figures appear as if they are in garden scenes. The drawing compositions reference scenes from Star Trek, a popular sci-fi series, and scenes from Smile Orange, a satirical film from the 1980s that critically analyzed the effect of tourism on Black males working in a Jamaican tourist resort. I was interested in both these source materials throughout 2021 because they showed me representations of males (particularly Black males) expressing complex narratives through their emotions and moments of reflection. I found these narratives inspiring and mesmerizing. Moreover, I have redrawn selected moments from these narratives and mixed in some of my self-portraits, adding myself to these emotional narratives. I want these drawings to be compound representations of male intimacy, self-reflection, and provocation, contrasting the figurative narratives and pastoral scenes usually depicted on delftware or chinaware ceramics.

My prints consist of graphite screen prints on paper. I fold paper sheets containing my print images into various multi-faceted objects and combine them to create sculptural wall hangings. These wall hangings are usually large in scale. Previous examples of my wall hangings range from 140x215 cm to 120x460 cm. The works were featured at my solo showcaseLooking Back and Thinking Ahead, which was on display at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands in June 2017. The works were also shown at the Carifesta XIII showcase in Barbados in August 2017.

Many of the images I source for my screen prints are collected from the Cayman Islands National Archives (CINA). I also collect images from Caymanian family photograph collections. I am interested in using images placed within my wall hangings as monumental objects to provoke narratives of missing identities and to show the importance of photographs in maintaining memory in modern society. I often choose images of unidentified people to assist this narrative and question whether these images should be archived or if the identity of the people captured in the photographs no longer exists in the historical memory of the photograph owner. I am also interested in how my chosen materials for printmaking affect the outcome of the works. I believe that situations created from the materials can greatly impact the narrative of the prints I produce. For example, some images become disrupted when they are reproduced with graphite powder. This causes the visual identity of the people within these images to be removed and refines the visual importance of their identity. In this way, the ghosts of the unidentified people are allowed to be released from the image through the process-based abstraction of the graphite powder material shifting through the screen printing process. Furthermore, I also enjoy using newsprint paper as an image surface and as a structural material that is portable. I believe newsprint allows my images to become more diverse when they take the form of the paper objects I create for the wall hangings.

These water tanks were created for a solo exhibition held at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands (NGCI) in June 2017. They are mixed-media containers that hold arrangements of ceramic portrait busts and artificial flowers suspended in water. The containers have lighting systems placed in their hoods, which allow the tanks to be viewed in lit and non-lit gallery settings. The tanks range from 10-gallon containers (56x30x30 cm) to 40-gallon containers (97x51x23 cm). 

The format of the water tanks resembles the design of traditional Caymanian gravestones that are shaped like little houses and can be found in the eastern districts of Grand Cayman. Those stones were created to symbolize house offerings for the spirits, and they also served the practical purpose of grave markers for the people buried in the sand below them. However, as time passed, the gravestones were displaced by tropical storms and other developments. They were moved from their original locations and the people they were supposed to identify were forgotten.  I found it interesting how these gravestones became structures that were important to identify a person but lost their specificity after being displaced by the tropical weather. The stones themselves now function as ghosts representing the presence of lost human spirits, and in this instance the human presence is adopted by a geometric sculpture.

With my tanks, I combine different ways to represent a human presence by placing figurative, ceramic sculptures and the geometric, house structures of the Caymanian gravestones together in a single unit. My tanks become further developed when they use water to submerge ceramic sculptures and artificial flowers together as installations for water burials.

From November 2017 to January 2018, I completed an artist residency with the Leipzig International Artist Programme (LIA).  While in Germany, I visited the Albertinum Museum in Dresden and viewed several displays of broken objects from classical public sculptures that were once placed around the city. I was intrigued with these objects and how they were being displayed in glass cases. I was reminded about how objects are transformed within museums, taken out of their original context, and given a new meaning because of their physical lifespan and the history of their movement from one location to the next. This reminder was further enforced when I met an artist group from Mozambique whose practice involved recollecting and returning cultural artifacts from their villages that were taken during German East Africa colonial rule and placed within collections in the institutions of Leipzig.

I decided to devote my sculptural practice during my time at this residency to the idea of replacing objects and monitoring their lifespan to generate meaning and cultural memory. I paired the format of broken, displaced objects with a narrative for contract workers which I became aware of during my time at the Spinnerei. I learned that during the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990) many contract workers from Cuba, historically referred to as gastarbeiter meaning“guest worker”, were brought to Leipzig to fulfill temporary work placements within the spindle factories and other industries. These Cuban contract workers were brought to Germany as part of a trade agreement between the GDR and Cuba. This agreement assigned Cuban contract workers to live and work within Germany for fixed salaries, and they were not allowed to intermix with the German public. After the trade agreement was removed, the Cuban workers were uprooted from their locations in Germany and sent back to Cuba. I became concerned with the negative outlook of this narrative and decided to embrace it and explore a sense of replacement with the sculptural format I witnessed at the Albertinum Museum.

For the three months I spent in Leipzig, I created nine portrait busts from clay to represent displaced people. I had these clay works on display in my studio during the Sense of Place exhibition in the Spinnerei Winter Rundgang. After the showcase, I shattered the portrait busts and had them buried in a garden area within the Spinnerei campus. The burial ceremony was documented through video and can be viewed on YouTube or in select exhibitions. Parts of the broken busts were saved and later re-used within Sedimente, the LIA 10-Year Anniversary Showcase. These objects and the documentation of their lifespan continued my interest in object replacement, and they began to negotiate between the value of the object as a physical form and the value of the object's influence through its transformation from one location to another.

All exhibition photos are credited to Spinnerei and Walther LeKon.

From November 2017-January 2018, I attended an artist residency with the Leipzig International Artist programme in Leipzig, Germany. During my time in Leipzig, I created new drawings. These works were made with liquid graphite and acrylic placed on paper and acetate cut-out forms. The drawings were placed on wallpaper I collected from hardware stores in Leipzig. The cut-out forms in the paintings are arranged upwards and turn into hybrid creatures and combineaspects of tropical plants, human faces, and human appendages.

The drawings were inspired by a narrative I became aware of while living in Leipzig. I learned that during the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990) many contract workers from Cuba, historically referred to as gastarbeiter ( meaning “guest worker”), were brought to Leipzig to fulfill temporary work placements within factories and other industries. TheCuban contract workers were brought to Germany as part of a trade agreement between the GDR and Cuba. This agreement assigned Cuban contract workers to live and work within German factories, like the Spinnerei, for fixed salaries, and they were discouraged from intermixing with the German public. After the trade agreement was removed, the Cuban contract workers were uprooted from their locations in Germany and sent back to Cuba. I was concerned with the negative outlook of this narrative. The act of diaspora created from the design of contract workers caused the Cuban people to be bartered into unfamiliar locations like trading goods. I felt that this act was a result of a very complex social order in GDR and I wanted to address the previous existence of these contract workers within the historic Spinnerei complex. Therefore, I attempted to address the existence of these workers by drawing multiple hybrid creatures that were placed on the wall of the Spinnerie complex and combined to make a tropical mural.

My mural responded to the contract worker narrative by using hybrid, tropical creatures (inspired by the works of Wilfredo Lam) to challenge the industrial format of the Spinnerie and turn it into a tropical space. The creatures were also made to be portable drawings that could travel after their initial presentation in Leipzig. I designed the drawings to disassemble into various parts and travel lightly within a 61x77x15cm crate. The tropical forms are adaptable and have shifted in their orientation when reassembled in new locations. The temporary manner of the creatures allows them to make a tropical mural that displays a unique presence, yet it is not fixed to any one location. Instead, they were designed to be portable and are defined by their transportation. The portability and temporary state of the creatures make them similar to the designed roles of the Cuban contract workers whose presence they represent.

The Tropical Forms were later redesigned for the Arrivants Exhibition which was featured at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society in Bridge Town, Barbados in November 2018, and for the Tropical Visions exhibition at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands in June 2019. I also adapted the aesthetics from the Tropical Forms into a digital collage project that I titled "See Your Travel Agent" and they were used for the Toof Prints public art project curated by Kriston Chen in Oranjestad, Aruba in August 2018.

I recognize that the idea behind the Tropical Forms has evolved from the specific narrative of the Cuban contract workers, and I now attempt to promote discussion about migration caused by political matters and how such movement encourages sexual encounters and coupling between different cultural groups. I also realize that migration is historically recognized by both positive and negative circumstances, but I feel that hybridizing and cross-cultural marriages should be embraced.

As a person who was born and raised in Grand Cayman, a small set of islands in the Caribbean, many of my creative projects are reflective of my upbringing and reflective of my interest in the historical circumstances of Caribbean people during the time of new nationhood after World War II. Such interests appear within the content of the imagery I am sharing within this selection of works on paper, each made between 2022 and 2024. This selection consists of drawings and prints. Several of the works are made from a process of screen printing with graphite powder and then placing hand-drawn additions with liquid graphite or watercolor. Others are made from processes of analog and digital collage to make archival inkjet prints.

These drawings, titled Souvenirs from America, are charcoal drawings on paper that are framed and surrounded by vinyl graphics relating to the content of the framed drawings. The drawings were made during the time I spent in the United States in the summer of 2020. They depict tropical plants and figurines collected and kept in my apartment in Ohio, USA. Overlaid on the figures of the drawings' compositions are graphics depicting moments from various American speeches presented in 2020 through social media, like political speeches, movie monologues, comedy routines, music videos, and interviews. To me, each framed drawing is a precious moment that gets extended by vinyl graphics. The graphics illustrate a larger context of the American black experience that I consumed through social media and had an impact on me during the summer of 2020. These drawing installations have become my American mementos, or my American souvenirs from that year.

Dimensions and details for each drawing:

Souvenirs from America, 2020

Approximately 70x 60 inches, 177x 152cm

Charcoal, vinyl, and acrylic on paper, wood, plexiglass, vinyl

Dimensions and details for the full installation of drawings:

Souvenirs from America, 2020

Approximately 96x 144 inches, 243x 365cm

Charcoal, vinyl, and acrylic on paper, wood, plexiglass, vinyl