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My father’s family owned a sugar plantation in St. James Parish, Louisiana for most of the 19th century. My grandfather worked in the sugar industry his entire adult life.
Because of my family history, I painted images of cane fields and sugar kettles, the large cast-iron cauldrons used in pre-industrialized sugar production.
Sugar production generated vast wealth, which was integral to the development of the United States. Sugar and its byproducts, molasses and rum, also drove the Atlantic slave trade.
While my painted images are intentionally benign, the actuality of sugar contains the contradiction of riches and oppression, of nation-building and stolen labor. Like so many developed places on earth, a cane field is beautiful; it also contains a story hidden beneath the beauty.