Traces Of Untold Stories

Artist Statement

Robyn Denny

Growing up in Durban, sugar plantations surrounded me – it was their lush fecundity which first drew me in.

Yet over time, a guttural unease – unconscious, unarticulatable – began to emerge. As a girl, visiting the Mauritian sugar plantations echoed and amplified these guttural inklings.

Now in Príncipe, where the old sugar and chocolate estate ruins are being devoured by nature, traces can be found about how plantations – such as the ones of my childhood – came into being. A tension and devouring is enacted in the foliage and architecture I paint and film on this barely known African island off Equatorial Guinea.

Here, I can feel in my epigenetics the recent violent thrust of the British/Dutch East India Companies, and the Portuguese with their own imperial economic voracity. A colonial wrenching and exploitation of a people to extract from Príncipe, but also from Mauritius and Durban, the sweet yet bitter yields of my childhood.

Nearing the completion of this film and painting cycle, the arc of exploration can be distilled into one motif: ‘tropical plantations and their subterranean stories’.