Kept Alive Within Us

From left to right: Untitled, 2c, 2021
Untitled, 3, 2021
Untitled, 4, 2021

Heirloom is a jar of dried fruit and currents soaked in rum, port and sherry. These materials are prepared together to eventually combine with other cake ingredients to make the artist’s family’s version of Black Cake. Derived from British Black Pudding, this cake is usually made during holiday season throughout regions of the Caribbean and among the diaspora.

“Despite the context in which it is derived, Heirloom holds a power that brings us together whether through our love for cake or through humorously competitive tendencies to declare that our country makes the best. Placing the jar in a position of reverence centres the stories it is a part of, and the people attached to them.”

Left: Untitled (Sundays for tending the garden, no.1 & no.2), mixed media collage on paper
Right: Panama, digital collages, 2020

From left to right: Entanglements: Debbie, 2022
Naya I, 2022
Ossu, 2022

Much of Andrea Chung’s multimedia work references the sea and ‘island’ life. Here, the artist presents a series of large-scale cyanotype prints of a beautiful but deadly form of marine life – the lionfish. Interested in the ways that the environment of the Caribbean has been altered through the introduction of invasive plants and animals with no natural predators to mitigate their presence, the artist comments on themes of migration and human intervention into nature. The lionfish was brought to the West for the aquarium trade and has taken over its new “natural” habitat. As the lionfish is beautiful, but highly poisonous, Chung has stated that in these works she is exploring the “beautiful and seductive image of the fish.” While these cyanotypes are “stunningly beautiful with its deep, rich blues and graceful swimming fish,” something sinister lingers under the surface of the water as the fish operate as a metaphor for colonized terrain and the experiences of colonization.