HASSAN ALI
SHANNON ALONZO’S Sediments invites patrons into a world of mangroves, movement and memory.
Per the zine and pamphlet given to patrons on entry, the show is an exploration of Alonzo’s fascination with Carnival’s capability to create a sense of cultural rooting – of home – for a people.
This is made clear by the first piece’s title, Wire Bender. The piece features two layers of paper onto which black and (a singular) blue mangroves sprawl. Scattered along various points of the roots of these mangroves are crabs, coloured in various mixes of blue, black and white.
Two hands are holding onto different root segments of the same mangrove – the blue one – mirroring a wire-bender preparing a frame. This brings the viewer to another of Alonzo’s listed fascinations: the concept of the rhizome.
Alonzo is actively referencing Édouard Glissant, a Martiniquan writer, who adapted the concept from the work of French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Glissant says the rhizome is a means to know the world through relation; through a multicultural lens instead of living in one tradition. While Alonzo acknowledges that mangrove roots aren’t rhizomatic in nature, she says that there is a certain interconnectedness in the appearance of mangrove roots which reminds her of the concept. Arms grasping mangroves can also be found in Arm/y.
[caption id="attachment_1141823" align="alignnone" width="980"] Shannon Alonzo's Wire Bender. - Photo courtesy Melissa Miller[/caption]
Alonzo says that these arms are another historical reference, this time to Jacob Delworth Elder’s Cannes Brûlées published in 1998. The articles features a retelling of an eyewitness account of stickfighters confronting police with their arms interlock: sticks in one hand, flambeaux in the other. The piece features mangrove trunks sinking into the water, shooting off into roots.
The trees, which go from black to blue to white from top to bottom, are being gripped by six pairs of arms. The water in this piece also changes into all the same colours as the mangroves. Colour comes sparsely in Alonzo’s work.
She says that after working in costume design, fashion, and production design for film and television – notably with Peter Minshall, Meiling Inc Ltd – she wanted to focus on lines and textures, reducing her palette to black and white. At some indeterminate and forgotten date, she wanted to add in colour while retaining that focus on lines and textures and chose blue.
[caption id="attachment_1141826" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Arm/y is a creation in pencil and ink on paper. - Photo courtesy Melissa Miller[/caption]
Blue carries many meanings for her: it reminds her of water, of migration (wilful or not) and of the sea imagined as history; blue as a protective colour to ward off maljo; of the film she worked on which featured blue devils, Play The Devil. If one considers all these symbolic meanings, Wire Bender becomes more than interplay between a contemporary, almost-industrial scene of someone bending wire for costumes
