Annalee Davis‘ hybrid practice is as a visual artist, cultural activist, and writer. Her work sits at the intersection of biography and history, focussing on post-plantation economies by engaging with a particular landscape of Barbados. Her studio, located on a working dairy farm that operated historically as a 17th century sugarcane plantation, offers a critical context for her work. Drawing, walking, making (bush) teas, and growing living apothecaries, Annalee’s practice suggests future strategies for repair and thriving while investigating the role of botanicals and living plots as ancestral sites of refusal, counter-knowledge, community, and healing.

Interested in the idea of slow cultural work, and this urgent moment we inhabit, I believe we experience the ecological crisis internally and externally. As much as I wanted to move slowly on arrival in Schöppingen, my interior gearshift was hard to maneuver. After a month of self-imposed pressure to be productive, I aligned with the beat of my internal drum, based in my studio opening onto a grassy plot sheltered by Linden and Willow trees.

Meeting creatives from the world over, I basked in the gentleness with which everyone was treated. Collaborative eco-dyeing experiments, exhibitions with fellows and meeting locals with intersecting interests were vital. Endless social events punctuated the long summer days.

International fellowships are bubbles but we partake in them because much of the ‘real’ world can be hard, precarious and unbearable. Given that artists have unwittingly become the shamans of our times, it is fellowships like these that offer a lifeline.