Echoes of the Ancient Ocean

Trinidad wasn’t always Trinidad. Before it broke off from the mainland, before the first people paddled up its rivers, this island was ocean floor. When I’m on the north coast at low tide, I can feel it — the way the rocks remember being wet, the way the shells still trust the water.

This piece is a landscape but really it’s a memory of the sea. I stitched horizontally, in long steady lines, the way water moves when nobody is watching it. The palette is older than the tropical postcard blues; it’s the deeper, greyer, more truthful colour of a body of water that has been here longer than any of us.

For collectors who love our coast but are tired of the sunset-and-palm-tree version of it, this piece is a quieter, older song.