Kelly Sinnapah Mary turns family memory into painted worlds
In her recent portraits, Kelly Sinnapah Mary places a recurring figure, Sanbras, inside dense plant life and family memories. Colossal highlights work shaped by Guadeloupean history and notes an upcoming show at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut in February.
Born in Guadeloupe, the artist builds scenes where people, plants, and animals seem tied together by a single process of change. These paintings do more than place a figure in foliage: they make visible a relationship of dependence and exchange between bodies, species, and inherited stories.
Sanbras, a figure Mary derived from a derogatory children’s book from the 19th and 20th centuries, returns as a presence that reworks an imposed image into something else. Through saturated color, organic textures, and uncanny compositions, Sinnapah Mary shows how a figure can carry both injury and reclamation.
The Book of Violette, named after the artist’s grandmother, sits at the center of this body of work. Here she weaves childhood memories, folklore, and family history into scenes where medicinal plants, books, clothing, and spiritual signs form a space of thought as much as a setting.
For painters and drawing enthusiasts, the appeal lies in how Sinnapah Mary constructs looking itself: she does not simply depict a world, she builds visual links between skin, leaf, fabric, and light. The work invites viewers to see painting as a place where the intimate, the political, and the mythical meet.
Source : Colossal