"Home to Self: Explorations and Introspections Paintings, Prints, Mixed Media"
20 March - 26 April 2025
Olympia Main Gallery
Judith Salmon: Making Her Voice Heard
"I see my art as things coming together...an overall feel of Gestalt - a way of art making. I start with what's inside me, how I feel about something, then put it out there for people to understand." -- the artist.
Judith Salmon, a dedicated and professional artist has been creating art for over 40 years, consistently experimenting and excelling across multiple genre. Her ability to move seamlessly between different artistic disciplines has earned her recognition as a multi-genre artist, known for producing evocative and mesmerizing pieces. Salmon has long known that she has a specific voice, that she has something to say, a message. Her extensive body of work provides her with the platform and freedom to express and share her vision.
In a recent interview, Salmon described her journey as sometimes feeling like she is "swimming against the tide, but swimming, and I'm going to finish." This powerful analogy reflects her perseverance over the past four decades, exhibiting both locally and internationally. Some of her most notable works, including The Boat Series and Travellers, explore themes of water, migration, and movement.
One of the distinguishing markers of a veteran artist is not just understanding that they have something to say, but despite obstacles, unapologetically sharing their vision, regardless of who is listening or not because the work is paramount. Salmon believes that artists should research whatever themes they are working through before documenting -- putting paint on canvas -- and should consciously and actively contribute to the discourses on the arts. Art is not merely a reflection of life, but moves to a deeper realm of knowing, sublime, the intersections of interior/exterior, history and what is yet to come, and of course, the artist's vision. Judith Salmon cogitates, deliberates, co-creates with the universe, and realizes with conviction that "I'm not swimming against the tide. I'm in a place of abundance, so there's no hoping only knowing."
-- Opal Palmer Adisa, Ph.D
Professor, Writer/Editor, Cultural and Gender Activist,
Former Director of The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, RCO, UWI, Mona
View exhibition e-catalogue here.
View exhibition press release here.
Exhibition opening
Exhibited works
View External links and Publications
Click here to read exhibition feature in The Gleaner
Click here to read exhibition feature in Jamaica Observer
"Confronting the hold: Memory in the work of Judith Salmon"
By: Honor Ford-Smith, Associate Professor Emeritus, York University.
Judith Salmon's studio in Kingston is also her home. There, the walls are covered with her paintings and with works-in-progress. There are incomplete assemblages; a map of the layout for this exhibition; a tabletop covered with clippings and notes to herself. A small retablo of her mother ready for church, presides unobtrusively over the room--a gift from an artist friend. A torn page from an old hymn book is stuck into it. Two large masks are sentinels at her front door. She bought them on a visit to the island of Goree, one of the forts that imprisoned the enslaved in Senegal.
She has made a set of sculpted feet from wax. "It take two hours of sitting absolutely still to make one of these," she says. Cerating each pair of feet is an act of remembrance recalling the long trek the captives made on foot to the forts on the West African coast. In Ghana at Elmina, another fortress, millions passed through what is now called "the Door of No Return" before entering the horrifying hold of the ships that would transport them to the auction blocs of the Americas.
On one wall of the studio is a small sculpture of a Town. She--who made pots by hand according to the same recipe her African fore-parents used prior to the crossing--is an enduring inspirations to Salmon. Rolled up canvasses, screen printed textile, add to a space in which gathering, making and remaking bear witness to a life of continuous commitment to the labour of creation.
Derek Walcott famously wrote "Amnesia is the true history of the new world." Salmon's art disturbs that complacent amnesia. For decades, her work has explored the shifting iterations between stripping away and profusion, between narrative and evocation, in her art. On the one hand there is the cutting away of what is covered or hidden in the woodcuts for her prints. On the other, the collages, canvases and screen prints are made up of a profusion of materials, paper, leaves, sand, sewn shapes, to create an opaque allusive relationship between presence and absence.
She puts it this way:
"I was drawn to printmaking because it is a way of making something by uncovering what is hidden. You make something visible by taking away what obscures it. You move forward by doing things in reverse. What you carve on the wood is the mirror image of what appears on paper. The mixed media paintings and collages are the other way around. You add and revise, add and revise the material, so that each layer alters the next as it adds to and changes it. The viewer reads the layers together, so the interpretation is not fixed and final."