Ada Maricia Patterson
Since the mask is usually the center of a costume or character in my art, I had to ask myself: what happens when there’s no mask at all? Eventually, I realized that the answer could be headlessness.
Ada Maricia Patterson (1994, Barbados) is a visual artist, writer and educator working across multiple mediums, spanning performance, video, costuming, textiles, poetry, masquerade – a supressed Barbadian tradition, and more recently painting and drawing on silk. Through her shapeshifting practice, Patterson tells new stories or reimagines old stories in new recuperative ways. Whatever its form, the work reflects a deep connection to her Barbadian culture. “Barbados is always present...whether as the physical site where I create or through the materials I use, or in the folk practices and cultural imagery that resonate within it.”
Her recent work considers grief, elegy writing (poems of serious reflection) and archiving as tools for disrupting the disappearance of communities queered by different experiences of crisis. Seeking to account for the complexities of bodies often left unaccounted for —bodies queered by crisis, bodies marked as invisible, dispensable or ‘ungrievable’, bodies confronted with the harsh material realities of a world not built for their survival—her ongoing work imagines elegies for those bodies and moments always already out of time.
