Painted on the Garden Wall

Every old house in Trinidad has a garden wall, and every garden wall becomes a canvas eventually. Paint peels, moss arrives, someone’s child draws on it, a bougainvillea decides it lives there now. Nothing stays flat for long.

This piece plays with that memory. The figure is half-portrait, half-mural, as if she has stepped out of the wall or is about to step back into it. I stitched over the surface deliberately, letting the thread interrupt the illusion — because our walls, too, are always being interrupted by weather and time and life.

For diaspora collectors who miss the specific texture of a Trinidad wall — that soft, weathered, story-holding surface — this piece brings some of it home.