Two artists have been commissioned by Aberdeen Archives, Gallery and Museums to interpret a collection of 94 Victorian portraits and create an artwork in dialogue.
Annalee Davis and Richard Maguire were selected as part of the 'Self Portrayed' commission series. The series is based on Alexander Macdonald’s portrait collection from 1878. All the portraits are on uniformly sized canvases and show male artists from the era, many of whom Macdonald had friendships with. Over half are self portraits and include names like Sir John Everett Millais, Joseph Farquharson, Jules Breton and John Singer Sargent.
Annalee Davis is an artist working with post-plantation economies, engaging with the land where she lives and works. Here she shares her thoughts on the commission.
Annalee Davis
Title: Self as Plot
Media: Appliqué, embroidery & 18th-19th-century shards on domestic cotton
Dimensions: 30” h x 25” w
Year: 2025, commissioned by Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums
As I worked on this self-portrait, I kept returning to questions about what constitutes the self and how to navigate one’s place within a particular context. As I consider my sense of self, it is intimately tied to a sense of place and of belonging to a particular site – Walker's Dairy in the parish of St. George on the small island of Barbados in the Southern Caribbean, once referred to as Britain’s first sugar isle.
My profile portrait, framed by lace attached using satin stitch, is interwoven with topographic lines situating the portrait on the contour lines of Walkers Dairy farm where my home and studio are located. Punctuating the bold contour lines are faint straight stitches suggestive of the walking ritual I undertake regularly at dawn or dusk so as to form a more intimate relationship with a landscape mediated by four centuries of the plantation, initially shaped by the 17th-century colonial project.
Self as Plot by Annalee Davis
Motherwort and Cerasee leaves, plants I grow in my garden, are located at the top right and left corners of the work. They refer to botanicals growing on the hedgerows of sugar cane fields and in small plots of land given to the enslaved who planted and nurtured healing plants used in bush teas, bush baths and bush medicine. These plots, sites of community, care, and tradition in Barbadian enslaved African society, didn’t conform to the geometry of the plantation, suggesting other ways of being.
A parasite wriggles through the topographic lines–reminiscent of the extractive history of the plantation. Small shards from the 18th and 19th centuries found while walking the lands, are attached at the lower end of the work, proposing soil as an archive, a holder of memory, a witness and a regenerator of life. My sense of self is intrinsically interconnected with this place that I have called home for twenty-four years, and which has been connected to my paternal family since the 1920s.
This work is now on display in Gallery 1 at Aberdeen Art Gallery.
