What the Archive Doesn't Hold
Art Portfolio
A series of visual works translating research on colonial history into form, exploring how power, memory, and identity are carried beyond the written archive.
The Taken Crown
45cm x 30cm, oil on canvas, fragmented crown, 2025
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In this painting, I composed a single face from the features of many girls who were eliminated from the Miss Teenage Canada 2024 beauty pageants for not fitting mainstream aesthetics. A man in a suit, representingEuropean male judges, reaches out to remove the crown from her head—she represents all of us. I bought twenty rhinestone crowns, shattered them, and reassembled the fragments to form this frame, reflecting the fragmented ideals of beauty imposed by colonial and patriarchal standards: glittering, alluring, yet violently broken.
Sweetness and Skin
15 cm x 10cm, sugar, coffee beans, 2025
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I made a few sugar sculptures with coffee beans embedded in them. Sugar represents plantation economies and the whiteness of colonizers, while coffee, another colonial cash crop, symbolizes indigenous andAfrican presence in the Caribbean. By linking commodities to bodies and finally burning the sculptures, the piece critiques how colonial economies not only extracted wealth but also shaped aesthetics, turning whiteness into a symbol of refinement and national identity, while darker features were devalued despite representing the true majority heritage.
