Not easily spoken (2021), 36”x26”, Acrylic and mixed Media on Chipboard
Edith Enters (2020), 40”x 24”, Acrylic and mixed Media on Chipboard
6:00pm Hymns (2019), 22”x 30” (each), Acrylic and mixed Media on Chipboard
Breeze Blocks (2020), 10”x10” (each), Acrylic and mixed Media on Chipboard
New Ground (2019), 20”x17”, Acrylic and mixed Media on Chipboard
Plant Stand (2018), 30”x30”, Acrylic and mixed Media on Chipboard
Finding Rest (2019), 20”x20”, Acrylic and mixed Media on Chipboard
Where you welcome me (2019), 20”x16”, Acrylic and mixed Media on Chipboard
Artist Biography
Khaffi Beckles (she/her) is an Afro-Caribbean artist and educator working at the juncture between painting, collage and installation. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts from the University of the West Indies and is a Fulbright Scholar, recently obtaining her Master of Arts in Art and Visual Culture Education.
Her current body of work examines the process of making/finding home, as it relates to the changing dynamics domestic space and familial ties. Her work has been exhibited in her home country Trinidad and Tobago in multiple group shows and she is currently working towards a solo exhibition.
Khaffi’s writing in Art Education has been published in The International Journal of Art Education and she is currently a part of the creative arts duo, The Art of Writing, which focuses on the collective power of writing and art making as tools for knowledge making.
Where you welcome me.
SXV presents the work of artist Khaffi Beckles in her series "Where you welcome me". This series of work straddles two periods of time where Khaffi felt untethered studying abroad in the United States and her unsettled returning “home” to Trinidad and Tobago. This series is the ongoing revelation of the uncertainties about people, spaces and objects that substantiated Khaffi's sense of home.
Yet, the series is also about finding peace in happy nostalgia and mourning the ‘loss’ of her mother, grandmother and that sense of nurturing maternity she has come to associate with the feeling of being at home.
Each piece is as much a reconciliation and putting to rest, as it is about welcoming herself to a new home, in herself.
Artist Statement
I am always attempting to hold on to what will ultimately become memory.
Like a constant opening and closing of my hands, squeezing, so that nothing of the experience, will escape. Nothing of what will disappear through a shift of place, become lost through a shift in time, and the transitory nature of ‘home’.
My paintings emerge as I consider how ordinary objects and physical space, become special because of these shifts, as they perform new roles as containers of memories gone. They are ascribed meaning, they’re what is left of memory. As a result, my paintings work to articulate these metaphoric containers, through vivid, colorful assemblages that signal the very real lives of objects and architecture, that have and ironically will fade from memory.
The shape of the paintings are led by the connections I am able to make through shape and color as i build the composition that best fleshes the memory. It is the hope that my own recollections through paintings, will remind others of memories, assemblages of their own.