Monoprints: photocopy transfer and watercolour on paper.

Paper size: approx.. 56 x 76 cm

 In 2012 I started this series of monoprints on paper that were a meditation on my Amerindian roots from my mother’s side of the family. The results were two series of prints titled: ‘Eyes Open’ and ‘Eyes closed’. I recently came across the writings of the British journalist and travel writer Norman Lewis and his work inspired me to finish the series and add the overall title of: “Genocide”.

 “The discovery of America by the Spanish initiated one of the most calamitous series of events and the most protracted human tragedy the world has ever known. Within a generation, all that remained of the grandiose civilizations of Central and South America were ruins and a wretched collection of plantation slaves, while to the north the impetus of conquest and extermination was only delayed. All the European newcomers were destroyers. The French demolished the nations of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. In Canada the British invented germ warfare by distributing blankets from a smallpox hospital among the tribes (a method favoured in Brazil to this day), while the freed American colonists pushed westwards behind a shield of treachery and massacre. The appalling fact is that most of the aboriginal inhabitants have been cleared from what amounts to one third of the world’s surface, and it is perhaps even more depressing that the remnants should have been reduced, by and large, to destitution and cultural nothingness.”

From : ‘The Survivors’ an essay by Norman Lewis, in his book “ A Voyage by Dhow” Johnathan Cape, London, 2001.