From the Catalogue Piece of Pomerac
by Christoper Cozier
The Caribbean was never about isolation as the capital of every island nation was a port. The trade winds, constantly flowing rivers and surrounding ocean currents, like the contemporary virtual flow of information, tells you of other places from which boats, planes, people, ideas, and commodities come and go - it is a site of exchange. It is more a site than just a sight - a place for things to happen.
The artist's detailed drawings of slapped mosquitos, her notebook studies of the back-steps of modest middle class concrete houses, the occasional Barataria night scene or the shape of a breadfruit leaf, all visual phenomena that we often ignore, became her own personal visual vocabulary or sensorial mapping.
As her response evolved, she began to have fun and invented hybrid animals and personages taken local consumer items or the Murtis of Hindu calendar art while still engaging and processing the expectations one conjures from old fashioned geographical annuals. Derived from the initial detailed drawings and notebooks, she began to convert the experience of the space, in which she found herself, into a constantly shifting and expanding installation of paper cut-outs. We were invited to share her experience of another world when moving around her studio in Trinidad. The journey from dislocation to relocation unraveled. These arrangements and symbolic systems did not just describe or display another world for us to observe and consume. It invited us to actively join her in conjuring another space - one of her own invention.
* Lara Dahlmann studied at the University of Applied Sciences (HAW) and lives and works in Hamburg.
During her studies she became interested in Caribbean culture. This interest led to travels and was intensified by longer stays. She got a travel grant from the DAAD and later worked as a resident artist at Caribbean Contemporary Arts / CCA7 in Trinidad and at LPEP in Buenos Aires, Argentina.