Caribbean House
Location: Nevis, West Indies
Dates: 2022–2023
Overview: A house on Nevis. A personal project.
Successive owners had emptied it of its island: air conditioning, marble, generic modernity, all overshadowed by the American way of life. The work was to give it back.
Local pottery was still made by Almena, seventy-five, born into a family of Nevisian potters. Her work everywhere on the island, her craft tradition fragile, weakened by lack of human interest around it.
“Creating from scarcity is a strength that takes creativity further.”Local wood, endemic to Nevis, was still used by fishermen for their fish pots, cut only at full moon, otherwise it does not hold and the insects come. From the boat to the house, the same wood, the same knowledge.
Reading a territory is being aware of what is there, to bring it back to life. Like Gina Epsom at Vanilla Paradise, who restarted vanilla production on Nevis from a single forest vine, a wild survivor from when Nevis was one of the first English colonies in the Caribbean and, more sadly, a major hub of the English slave trade in the Leeward Islands.
A house returned to the island. Not a restoration. A renewal.
