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The Point of No Return: Wendy Nanan as Postindenture Indian Female Visionary Artist
- Small Axe
- Duke University Press
- Volume 21, Number 2, July 2017 (No. 53)
- pp. 68-80
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay examines the organic connection between the methods and materials used by Indian artist Wendy Nanan and the metaphysical ideas that underpin her creativity. Her exposure to a mixture of religious and cultural practices drawn from Presbyterianism and Hinduism, to the variegated festivals of a postslavery postindenture society of Trinidad is re-presented in the symbolic and allegorical pieces that Nanan has produced for over two decades. These evoke messages of harmony despite difference and of political agency for a nation. Her symbolism establishes an Indian aesthetic and iconography that has evolved in this society beyond its original moment of entry to a point of no return to an imagined purity.