The Point of No Return: Wendy Nanan as Postindenture Indian Female Visionary Artist

In: Small axe: a journal of criticism, Band 21, Heft 2, S. 68-80

Abstract

This essay examines the organic connection between the methods and materials used by Indian artist Wendy Nanan and the metaphysical ideas that underpin her creativity. Her exposure to a mixture of religious and cultural practices drawn from Presbyterianism and Hinduism, to the variegated festivals of a postslavery postindenture society of Trinidad is re-presented in the symbolic and allegorical pieces that Nanan has produced for over two decades. These evoke messages of harmony despite difference and of political agency for a nation. Her symbolism establishes an Indian aesthetic and iconography that has evolved in this society beyond its original moment of entry to a point of no return to an imagined purity.