Artist Statement​
 

Emerging artist Monique Gilpin creates highly saturated photographic images of black bodies reminiscent of porcelain, in three dimensional empty space. ‘The Porcelain Series’ is a dialogue between the tensions of stability/instability which emerge in the traditional and contemporary lived realities of domesticity and the notion of ‘Home’. Porcelain figurines are commonplace in traditional Caribbean households. As documented in Michael McMillans ‘The West Indian Living Room’, 2009, the front room, in which porcelain figurines hold a particular place harking to British sensibilities, is ‘a conservative element of Black domestic life which is more complex and rich than the generality of the society ever realises.' This traditional domestic object is imbued with powerful colonial fractures and meanings, and yet simultaneously embody a predictable and stabilising force in the Caribbean psyche of ‘Home’. Monique seeks to explore visual expressions of this fracture and its containment in the contemporary identity experience.