The Spiritual Technologies of Jamaican Maroons

For Thomas-Girvan, memory is archaeology, and magic is not a supernatural force, but an ancestral one. Her assemblages gather fragments of the Caribbean’s past and reimagine them through forms that feel at once ceremonial and subversive. She draws on the region’s folklore as well as the examination of the land’s flora and fauna to uncover and weave together stories of resistance and survival. In that sense, Thomas-Girvan’s practice does more than preserve memory—she reorients us toward a more relational way of being.

Her recent solo exhibition Fugitive Pathways (2024), at New Local Space (NLS) in Kingston and curated by Rianna Jade Parker, explored the layered legacy of maroonage. This was drawn from her time spent in Maroon Town nestled in the Cockpit Country Protected Area of St. James. The exhibition centered around the specific histories and spiritual technologies of Jamaican Maroons. Through dynamic figures and charged scenes, Thomas-Girvan translates inherited memory into sculptural language—linking past, present, and future through the enduring arc of Afro-Caribbean lineage.

In Resistance Science, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan constructs a shadow box that places the viewer in a tropical jungle terrain against a glowing gradient of an electric blue, the foliage cut with precision and reverence. Palms, bamboo, and other trees are rendered in stark black, conjuring lushness and enclosure. Suspended from above is a round, earthen-toned Cacoon seed pod, also known as African Dream Herb, a talisman, etched delicately with a spider’s web. It hangs from a fine metal chain (or thread) held by bronze fingers. Below it, a bronze triangle—like a compass or an arrowhead—floats midair, tethered by a delicate chain to a small spider dangling just above the ground. There is a clear nod to Anansi, the West African trickster and primordial beacon of hard-earned wisdom. The silhouetted figures at the base hint at human presence or perhaps tombstones—ambiguous markers of memory. The jungle becomes a site of witnessing. Nature as agent and archive.

Thomas-Girvan’s Resistance Science and others in this seven-diorama series involve shadow play, suspended forms and intricately etched detail, making the viewer complicit in decoding. The work becomes a cypher of survival knowledge, passed on through craft and concealment. The composition balances on tension: between opacity and revelation, science and ritual, what we know and what we don’t.

And then there are the materials: driftwood, wire, calabash, precious metals, handmade paper, feathers. Thomas-Girvan is both a bricoleur and a philosopher. She does not use materials simply for their aesthetic; she selects them for their resonance. This material sensitivity—this trust in the agency of objects—lends her work sacredness. “Interested in nuance beauty” and using both as a tool*, she excavates, transforms, and reactivates. Her use of natural and salvaged materials models a way of being in relation to land, memory, and time. Seeds suggest generational knowledge. Mirrors suggest fragmentation and reflection. Metalwork suggests time, history, and the endurance of presence.

In a region often marked by rupture, erasure, and the commodification of culture, Thomas-Girvan’s work is her own fugitive pathway. With exhibitions such as Window on Memory (Cohen Gallery, Rhode Island, 2023), Bathed in Sacred Fire (Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, 2021-2022) and pieces such as Beyond Time and Space, and The Healing Stream, her refusal to flatten notions of the Caribbean is clear. Instead, she constructs living archives—objects that breathe, that mourn, that conjure a remembering.

Her intricate, soul-rooted work has not gone unnoticed. Thomas-Girvan is the only two-time recipient of the Aaron Matalon Award for outstanding contribution to the National Gallery of Jamaica’s biennial in 2012 and 2017. She also received a Commonwealth Foundation Arts Award in 1996 and the Institute of Jamaica’s Silver Musgrave Medal in 2014, affirming her place as one of the Caribbean’s most vital and visionary artists.

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan’s work—whether in the form of intricate objects or expansive multimedia installations—charts the Caribbean’s psychic and spiritual terrain. More than maps of grief, beauty, and survival, each piece she creates is a cosmological instrument, attuned to invisible presences and the unseen forces that shape us. Her work asks us to remember the journeys we’ve traveled long before each of our arrivals on Earth. To trace the invisible lines that tether us to stars, soil, and myth. In attuning us to the quiet frequencies of ancestral presence, her work reminds us that repair—of spirit, of story, of land—is not only possible, but necessary.

Nneka Jackson is a writer, cultural strategist, and attorney with a focus on intellectual property, creative economies, and cultural equity. She works with artists, organizations, and ecosystems to cultivate sustainable growth. As a writer, Nneka’s themes include diasporic memory, identity, folklore, and radical possibility.

Nneka Jackson participated in the JAS x C& Critical Writing Workshop in 2024. 

* Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan: Bathed in Sacred Fire, YouTube, [timestamp], posted by Kunstinstituut Melly, September 7, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfHWa1SUp3o&t=6s.