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Bio: Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer, professor, and interdisciplinary artist. She produces videos, sound sculptures, collages, and site-specific installations that foreground digital tools as a way of critiquing overlapping European colonialisms and creating sonic kinship through technologies. Her works examine how metadata and other taxonomies function as colonial sorting tools attempting to segregate life. Goffe was born in London to a Jamaican mother with roots in Port Antonio, Portland , raised in New York City and lives and works in Manhattan.
Bio: Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer, professor, and interdisciplinary artist. She produces videos, sound sculptures, collages, and site-specific installations that foreground digital tools as a way of critiquing overlapping European colonialisms and creating sonic kinship through technologies. Her works examine how metadata and other taxonomies function as colonial sorting tools attempting to segregate life. Goffe was born in London to a Jamaican mother with roots in Port Antonio, Portland , raised in New York City and lives and works in Manhattan.
Title of Work: Queen Nannies
Themes/Key Elements: Threatened Species, Storytelling, Sound Installation, Herbalists, Maroon Treaties, Land Sovereignty, Gender, Sexuality & Labour, Refusal, Black Geologies, Inter-Caribbean Intimacies, Defiance.
Identity Profile: Born in London to a Jamaican mother with roots in Port Antonio, Portland. Living in New York City.
Size of work unframed: 30 by 40 inches
Medium of Work & Artform: Canvas, thread, sound installation (10 minutes)
Summary: "Queen Nannies" depicts the impact of Queen Nanny on countless Afro-Caribbean healers, naturalists, and practitioners across the world. The petals of an upside-down pumpkin blossom form her dress as she grips a machete in her right hand with her back turned to the viewer. Three seeds fall on a mountainous landscape; the hinterlands where many Maroons and runways found sacred and lush spaces of refuge and ceremony across the Caribbean. Though she died in 1733, Grandie Nanny continues to recruit battalions of the underestimated who in their everyday lives are military strategists, commanders, healers, herbalists, gardeners, domestics, nurses, nursing home workers, and nannies. Celebrating technologies of Caribbean caring and cultivation, the artwork gestures to the defiant collective power of Maroon climate philosophies, science, and warcraft. The soundtrack that accompanies the artwork (Kill Them with the ‘No!’) is activated as part of the rituals of what it means to tune into the pulse of the natural environment in Jamaica.
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