Annalee Davis’s practice is a long engagement with land, memory, and the layered residues of colonial histories in the Caribbean. She works from within the terrain of Barbados, in a studio situated on a centuries-old sugarcane estate turned dairy farm, where she cultivates a dialogue between the living landscape and the cultural legacies embedded within it. Through drawing, installation, video, and botanical interventions, she assembles a body of work that interrogates the afterlives of plantation economies and the ecological and psychic wounds they continue to inscribe.
Her practice merges biography with topography—walking the fields once cultivated under monoculture, she listens to the stories the land remembers but rarely tells aloud. The materials she gathers—ledger pages from colonial archives, wild flora, indigo and hibiscus inks, medicinal herbs—are repurposed into new languages of healing and reclamation. By drawing, planting, and composting with these remnants, Davis enacts a quiet but radical form of refusal: refusing to let the past remain buried, refusing to let the land be reduced to extraction, and refusing to separate the ecological from the historical or the personal from the political.
She frames the Caribbean landscape not as a passive backdrop but as an active participant in its own narrative recovery. Her installations often read as altars, apothecaries, or repositories—spaces where viewers encounter time as sedimented, cyclical, and regenerative. In cultivating gardens and gathering plants long used in folk medicine, she conjures archives that are both embodied and botanical, resisting written history’s silence around indigenous knowledge, enslaved labor, and women’s roles in sustaining community through plants and rituals of care.
Davis’s work is not simply about what is remembered—it is about how we remember, and with whom. She invites audiences into shared acts of witnessing and tending, offering artistic practices that serve as composting processes for historical trauma. Her work does not seek closure but invites slowness, observation, and a politics of repair rooted in soil, breath, and belonging. In doing so, she expands the possibilities of contemporary art in the Caribbean, proposing the land itself as a living archive and a source of emancipatory imagination.