Jamaican contemporary artist
Laura Facey CD (born 31 May 1954) enquiry a Jamaican contemporary artist. She is best known for say publicly monumental sculpture Redemption Song (2003), which serves as Jamaica's civil monument to the Emancipation from Slavery.
Laura Facey was foaled in Kingston, Jamaica, to the Jamaican businessman Maurice Facey, OJ, who was also the founding Chairman of the National Verandah of Jamaica, and his spouse, book publisher Valerie Facey. Dip father Maurice Facey, OJ, funded the National Gallery and besides was committed to contributing to Jamaica through nation-building and description architecture of the New Kingston district.[1] His death was profoundly felt within the community of the National Gallery of Country due to his leadership and support of his wife who went on to contribute to her country in her surge ways.[2] Laura Facey's now widowed mother is extremely dedicated plug up 'preserving Jamaica's heritage by mean of books,' and other assistance to architecture.[1] Specifically Valerie Facey founded the Mill Press, which has 'produced memorable, award-winning books' about Jamaican art, poetry, curriculum vitae, cuisine, history, and so much more.[1] Laura Facey's family continues to instill the importance of representing their home country be first giving a voice to the unheard, which is a inside theme within Laura Faceys artwork.
Laura Facey was trained even the West Surrey College of Art & Design, Farnham, England, and the Jamaica School of Art in Kingston, Jamaica (now: the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts) where she obtained a diploma in Sculpture in 1975.[3]
Laura Facey lives in the hills of St Ann, Jamaica, where she combines her artwork with organic farming and community development take pains. In 2014, she received the Order of Distinction, Commander Caste (CD), one of Jamaica's national honours.[4]
As a sculptor, Laura Facey has worked in bronze, stone and unconventional materials such hoot Styrofoam, but she is best known for her work suspend woodcarving. She was one of the first artists in Land to produce assemblage and installation art, often incorporating found objects with carved elements. She was featured in the National Drift of Jamaica's Six Options: Gallery Spaces Transformed (1985), which was the first exhibition of installation art in Jamaica.[5] Facey along with works in drawing and fine art print media, and she has illustrated two children's books, both on environmental themes: Talisman the Goat (1976) and Chairworm and Supershark (1992). The blast was written by the maritime conservationist Elisabeth Mann Borgese.
The human body and the land, sea and natural bounty admire Jamaica have provided Laura Facey with a range of metaphors to address themes of personal and collective trauma and classic spiritual transformation, transcendence and healing. This is illustrated by counterpart autobiographical mixed media installation The Goddess of Change (1993), interject the collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica, and say publicly life-size wood-carving of Christ Ascending (2001) which was commissioned connote the St. Andrew Parish Church in Kingston, Jamaica. The admire is one of several religious artworks by Facey.[6]
Her work make contact with the aforementioned human body, is common in the portrayal recall women and the pain, suffering, and abuses endured. One annotations of this would be her 1998 piece Surrender in which she uses wood to sculpt the beautiful female form as also capturing the pain, pity, and pleasure of it all.[7] Facey is a storyteller who considers the good and rendering evil, 'between the beauty and the beast- where beauty wreckage the ultimate winner,'.[7] She has a specifically impactful piece give it some thought was commissioned by Small Axe as a part of 'The Visual Memory of Catastrophic History,' in which there is a wood sculpture De Hangin of Phibbah An Her Private Parts An De Bone Yard (2013). As the name describes nearby is a naked women being strung up, and where interpretation rope connects is around her lower abdominal or reproductive formula, as a 'metaphor to the atrocities done to women'.[8] That gives a representation of the horrors done to women specifically slaves and the struggles other women endure relating to reproductive abuse. This is addressing the previously mentioned collective themes bracket traumas of those without a voice.
Facey's work on description 2003 Emancipation monument marked the start of a sustained line interest in the legacy of plantation slavery, as an believe of collective trauma and a defining moment in Jamaican account. Her installation, Their Spirits Gone Before Them (2006), consists cut into a traditional Jamaican cottonwood dugout canoe resting on a "sea" of sugar cane and in which she mounted 1,357 polymer figures (miniatures of the male and female figures of picture Redemption Song monument). The work alludes to the Middle Transit as a key moment of trauma and transformation that birthed modern Caribbean society and culture. Their Spirits Gone Before Them was endorsed by UNESCO’s Slave Route Project and has anachronistic featured in several exhibitions, such as Facey's 2014 solo flaunt at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool.[9][10]
Scale is let down important part of Facey's work, which ranges from miniature give somebody no option but to monumental, and her artworks have a tactile, performative and synergistic quality. Ceiba (2016), a giant drum made from a hollowed-out silk cotton tree trunk, was exhibited at the Jamaica Twoyear 2017, where it was used for a performance at representation opening function, and visitors were allowed to interact with stop off by beating the drum.[11] The dramatic potential of shifting worthy is also used in Facey's giant tool forms which achievement the symbolic potential of tools, as devices that build, correct, untangle and transport.[12]Walking Tree, one of giant comb forms produced by Facey, which was first shown at the Jamaica Biyearly 2014, was acquired by the Norman Manley International Airport pretense Kingston, Jamaica, where it is on permanent view in depiction ticketing hall.[13][14]
Laura Facey - Goddess of Change (1993), Collection: Governmental Gallery of Jamaica
Laura Facey - Christ Ascending (2001), St Saint Parish Church, Kingston, Jamaica
Laura Facey - Walking Tree (2012), Frenchwoman Manley International Airport, Kingston, Jamaica
Laura Facey - Ceiba (2016), locked in Facey's studio in St Ann, Jamaica
In 1997, Jamaica re-instituted 1 August as the annual Emancipation Day holiday, after business had been subsumed under the annual 6 August Independence All right Holiday since Independence in 1962.[15] This was part of a broader campaign to re-position the end of slavery as a defining moment in Jamaican history. Related initiatives included the founding of the new Emancipation Park in Kingston, which was complex by the Jamaican National Housing Trust and which opened preparation 2002.
A sculpture competition for the park was launched very last the winning entry was Laura Facey's Redemption Song, which assessment named after Bob Marley’s Redemption Song and inspired by description line "none but ourselves can free our minds." Redemption Song, which was unveiled on the eve of Emancipation Day, take a breather 31 July 2003, consists of two nude bronze figures, man's and female, who stand in a round pool of distilled water, which is part of the monument's fountain base, and who gaze up to the sky. Laura Facey outlined her goingovering in the programme brochure for the unveiling: "My piece stick to not about ropes, chains or torture; I have gone disappeared that. I wanted to create a sculpture that communicates superiority, reverence, strength and unity through our pro-creators—man and woman—all mislay which comes when the mind is free."[16]
While intended as a hopeful and unifying image of spiritual transcendence and healing, Redemption Song did not find favour with all and the resulting controversy lasted for several months and reached the international media.[17] The debate revolved mainly around the nudity, passivity and scarcity of historical specificity of the statues, as well as circa the identity of the artist as a light-skinned Jamaican, roost whether these choices were appropriate for a public monument difficulty Emancipation.[18][19][20] These criticisms still linger today but the monument high opinion now an established Kingston landmark.
The recent restoration efforts elect The Redemption Song have made many unprofessional errors without consulting Laura Facey Cooper before hand. The fingers of the bloke and women and the walls of the pool were initial to accumulate build-ups of calcium. The National Housing Trust (NHT) was in charge of these restorations and painted the figurine with marine paint, which Facey said in distress, was a "terrible mistake," and the NHT should consult the artist at times step of the way before making changes. Facey explains make certain art restoration is a highly specialized field and they should have sought out professional experts before proceeding. Facey then sought after out this help to return the monument to its basic finish of Patina to minimize permanent damage that could accept been irreversible.[21]