Raneece Buddan | Desiderium

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Raneece Buddan, "Desiderium (detail)," 2022

Image courtesy of Bri Vos.

Opening Reception: Saturday, Dec. 3 from 7 to 9 p.m

A Desiderium, or a strong feeling of grief at something that was lost, drives Raneece Buddan’s in-depth material investigations. Her ceramics, printed textiles, and weavings are created from studying time-honoured clay, block printing, and weaving practices from Nigeria, Ghana, and India. A mixed-race Jamaican of Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean ancestry, Buddan considers each work a self-portrait. The hybridized pottery and printed textiles combine the visual motifs of Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Indian artwork, re-establishing lost connections to Buddan’s ancestors.

Beginning in 2019, Buddan began researching West-African pottery from the Ashante tribe in Ghana and their different hand-building techniques such as: coiling, direct pulling, and the hammer and anvil method where clay is slapped against an anvil and drawn upwards. Rather than making copies of these vessels, Buddan learned these methods by reading books and watching YouTube tutorials. At least twenty pots were made in this way with some that were cut in half and merged with Indian pottery styles as a form of self-portraiture. 

Earlier this year, Buddan began researching block printing methods on fabric from Okene and Akwete, Nigeria as well as Kalamkari designs from the Southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. This series of block printed textiles merges Nigerian geometric “V” and “flower” patterning with the detailed floral patterns of Indian Kalamkari printing. These two patterning styles overlap and are framed within one another, contrasting the hard-edged Nigerian patterns within a floral Indian backdrop. Taking her textile explorations further, Buddan has begun to weave her own textiles in the patterns of those in Karnataka, India and Okene, Nigeria. 

Buddan’s creation of a visually unified whole from contrasting styles is like the search for a unified identity in the combination of disparate visual styles, cultures, and times.

Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator

SAAG Art Library Project: Begun in 2020, the Gallery presents exhibitions as in-situ interventions within our Art Library. The Art Library Project features a diverse selection of artworks and mediums from regional contemporary artists. Artists are invited to think of the library as a unique exhibition context by investigating the Gallery’s programming around readership, publications, and its place within Lethbridge’s historic Carnegie library which opened in 1922. Artists are encouraged to consider the physical architecture of the library and its material holdings, responding to a broader and generative idea of what a library might be, as they change and adapt to new forms of knowledge production.

Raneece Buddan is a Jamaican visual artist who resides in Treaty 6 territory, Amiswaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). She immigrated to Canada in 2015 and completed her BFA in Art and Design with Distinction at the University of Alberta in 2020. In her work, she focuses on her cultural identity as a Jamaican woman of Afro and Indo-Caribbean ancestry. She shows the beautiful merging of these cultures and the complexities of being of multiracial identity in Jamaican society, particularly around hair and skin complexion. This is depicted by replacing her skin tone with fabrics meant to represent each ethnicity as well as incorporating synthetic hair. Her process is based on material exploration and finding figures within the material - the wood grains and mounds of clay. Her practice includes oil painting, woodworking, clay sculpting, printmaking and weaving.