Nicole Awai

The Conjuring Abstraction series came about as a response to the overturning of Roe vs Wade by the US Supreme Court in 2022. The event was triggering for me and I recalled the female Caribbean folklore character known as a Soucouyant, (derived from the French word succion – sucking), that I was aware of growing up in Trinidad as a child. The Soucouyant appears as a middle-aged woman or older, who at night, sheds her skin and becomes an airborne ball of fire. In this form, she can go anywhere and suck her victims’ blood. To kill her, you must find her uninhabited skin and throw salt or rice on it. She would not be able to reanimate it and would die. As a little girl, I was not afraid of her, I thought she was powerful and free.

While taking African Art classes in graduate school in the mid 1990’s, I recognized how the evolution of this character as a menacing and demonic figure was the result of the colonial powers’ suppression of African culture and influence on the enslaved Africans in the Americas. Specifically, targeting the resistance of women who were past their childbearing years, in their homeland they would have become leaders equal to men and were feared and revered. What is understood to be folklore is often regarded dismissively. I understand folklore to be a coded, historical record that is not about a singular event but an accumulated experience with its effect over time.

I am employing folklore to evoke the obscured histories of the inextricable connection between the formation of cultures and the commerce of natural resources in the Americas. When thinking of these issues, I combined the words CONJURE (to summon a spirit by magical or supernatural power, to influence or effect by or as if by magic, to call or bring to mind, evoke) and ABSTRACTION (the process of removing something from a source, extraction, removal, separation, detachment). The etymology of the word abstraction in concert and conversation with the history and application of the process of Abstraction in Modern and Contemporary Art allows the work to exemplify the life force of the Soucouyant and captures the visceral materiality of her transfiguration.