Llanor Alleyne

Out of the larger Moonlight collages come the Moonlight Blues: smaller collages with singular figures immersed, nearly happily swallowed, by the landscape. Depicting solitary solace and respite, these smaller Moonlights seek to evoke the crackle of solo late night walks where not everything or everyone is sleeping.

These collages are 15in x 22in on black watercolor paper.

This series of narrative collages are a homage to black women at rest, at play, and in communion with each other and the natural world — enjoying the land that they are so often depicted in (especially in western and historical paintings and etchings) as tilling and toiling on behalf of someone else.

These works feature numerous hand-drawn and painted elements on paper and mylar. They are 22in W by 30in tall on black watercolor paper.

Started shortly after the Fugitive Ecologies series, Sprays are an overt celebration of abstract botanical arrangement.

Started shortly after a move to Tulsa, OK, and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Fugitive Ecologies were created out of the necessity to stay sane and grounded in a new place amid surreal circumstances. Learn more about the thought process behind them in this interview between Llanor and the cultural theorist, Marsh Pearce.

Inspired by Toni Morrison’s novel, Paradise, these 19”x25” collages started in April 2019, take their visions from Black feminists liberation texts.

Made exclusively for co-exhibition with Barbadian artist Ronald Williams during the show 6 for a 9, these 16"x20" collages on acrylic paper were created with musicality in mind and titles that reflect their roots in song.

Born from experimentation with my approach to portraiture, I limited myself to three basic colors and ink — forcing a re-adjustment of my collage gestures that had become muscle memory. What emerged is a different kind of narrative that while speaking to the female perspective also questions what it means to be obliterated, obscured, marked and in some instances, how turning our backs to the audience can raise questions about who we are and how we are seen; even when we are not looking/engaging we are still on display.

The Queering Cane series of collages was created specifically in response to Prizm 2017's theme, Universal Belonging. The collages, which were started in sketchbook form in the summer of 2017, explore what it means to be hiding in plain sight as a queer woman in the Caribbean. They employ sugarcane as a call to love and sweetness while the field itself stand as a place of seclusion and discretion, investigating the fears, anxiety, tenderness, and unity queer women of color experience in a place of beauty dominated by legislation that is antithetical to love and compassion.

The collages were exhibited during Prizm 2017 (December 5-17) in Miami during Miami Art Week. On March 24, 2018, the Queering Cane series was the focus of Norton Museum of Art's Sophie Davis Curatorial Fellow for Gender and Racial Parity Ladi'Sasha Jones' presentation, "Queer Identities: Black Surrealists Nudes" during the Black Portraitures Conference at Harvard University in Boston.

“Queering Cane yields a fantastical effect to the realities of the queer woman’s body and bodies in relation to one another, in the Caribbean,” Jones said. “Many of her subjects appear ghostly, or fable-like as they perform disappearing acts between the black back-drops they emerge from and the sharp contrasts of the surrounding cane stalks and colorful landscape positioned in the foreground. There’s an abundance of movement throughout the works. No static posturing. Only vivid and intentional compositions of the bodily subjectivity.”

Created for my first solo exhibition in Barbados, this collection of collages share painting DNA and eludes to the interior bursting out to the exterior.

"The term Quaternary reflects the most recent periodical shift in the earth’s physical landscape. 'Quaternary: Four Barbadian Female Artists', draws on this meaning and highlights the works of four women artists as having the ability to represent real creative experiences, while shifting the typically accepted realm of visual imagery in the island of Barbados." —Natalie McGuire, Curator, Quaternary (2016)

These collages, created in a 10”x10” sketchbook, are part of an ongoing practice of expanding my visual vocabulary through creation of collages with “leftover” paintings.

The first collages I made in Barbados in 2013, these small assemblages on 9 x 12 canvas, marked a shift in my work toward interpretive portraiture.