Art is

By Donna Sealy

At Mahogany Mound in St George, you’ll find awardwinning artist Ashanti Trotman hard at work crafting bespoke functional wooden tableware and home décor pieces using mixed media, textures and designs that often seem more like art.

His journey to starting Remnant in 2019 wasn’t clearly delineated but it’s as interesting as the knotty designs in the fallen and found pieces of mahogany he recycles, which, in the grander sense, is an ode to Barbados’ cultural heritage.

Ashanti is a well-known and respected artist-sculptor of about four decades. As a cultural officer at the National Cultural Foundation (NCF) he coordinated Grand Kadooment and Junior Kadooment as part of the Crop Over Festival as well as programmes in NIFCA.

“I really had a wonderful time at the NCF in the 20-and-a-half or so years I spent there, overall. I was a visual artist working with the arts and I also worked with musicians. I had the opportunity to tour Europe with krosfyah, Square One and artists from Barbados, St Lucia, and other places and for close to ten years, I was curator of the Queen’s Park Gallery,” he told Weekend Buzz.

Hone skills

“Those programmes and the events gave me an opportunity to work with several artists in several media that also helped to hone my skills, my understanding, and my appreciation of the arts. I’m self-taught. I have not studied art formally, but I have worked with a lot of artists.

“Karl Broodhagen inspired me. I had the honour of curating two retrospective exhibitions for him as well as sitting down as a model for students at Combermere School,” he said, recalling the latter with laughter.

Ashanti, who teamed up with artists Christine Farmer and Maureen Tracey for the Artist Studio Tours this month, started carving from the age of 19. His focus has been Afrocentric and culturally oriented pieces, and he’s documented a lot of traditional aspects of Barbadian life such as sugar, music and the Barbados Landship.

He has won awards such the 2013 and 2014 Best In Show and the Central Bank purchase award at the Crop Over Exhibition. His work has been bought by “mostly visitors . . . as well as a number of Barbadians who appreciated the stuff that I do”.

Spiritual awakening

Along his journey he experienced a spiritual awakening. He resigned from the NCF in 2007 and registered at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), then changed his mind.

Instead he put his house on the market and after it was sold in three months, he, his wife, teenage daughter, who was a theatre arts student at Barbados Community College, and his son headed to Canada where they stayed for a couple months.

“I just wanted to get away for a while. I wanted to take my family to experience something else about the world, experience different cultures and not only to be tied to Barbados. So, I took my two kids and my wife out of school (she was studying at UWI) and took them on a trip. It was educational.

Different directions

“They didn’t find a school in Canada, so we ended up in South Africa for two years. Initially, we didn’t go for that. We wanted to get away from the cold but my son [who had just completed his exams at Queen’s College] found a school and decided he wanted to go so we all sort of followed him and went in different directions – all four of us.”

With his son enrolled at the Greenside Design Centre South, his daughter at Moving Into Dance Mophatong, and his wife resuming her studies in theology, Ashanti was at home searching how to share his skills while “holding the family together”.

He, along with the father of a pastor, set up a business training 20 homeless people from across Africa to polish tableware as part of a programme by Diana Carmichael, a well-known tableware company.

“That was exciting. I also assisted the soup kitchen and assisted persons from the soup kitchen in doing woodwork, making tables and chairs, as well as gardening. We set up a business at the church for homeless person. Then, I went on to do a job in construction in Free State, which is 150 miles outside of Johannesburg.”

That “wonderful experience” involved constructing homes for house helpers and servants using bricks “from one of the only remaining defunct cinemas in South Africa”.

It employed people from Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Ashanti also networked “with quite a few persons from the continent”, attended several studies including a course for young pastors from Sudan and Ethiopia and also studied at the South African Theological College learning to start churches in communities.

He was asked to return to Barbados in 2010 and did “several six-month stints” with the NCF before setting up a business with his son in 2019. He placed a 40-foot container on Valley Plantation, got some chainsaws and a generator and was about to fill orders when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020.

“Since I was on a farm, I could ease up to it every now and again and started experimenting with the saw and that was the birth of Remnant. A lot of mahogany trees are being cut and dumped as there’s no more furniture industry as such. I’ve done 80 or so pop-up events, mostly at Brighton Farmers Market every last Saturday of the month or at Massy supermarkets during 2023 and really had a chance to test the product.

“Art is that yearning within you to express everything, express yourself in anything and everything you do. You tend to want to express excellence, express the best feelings, the best inspiration that you can bring to anything that you create, and I guess that’s why my pieces look the way they do,” Ashanti said. (GBM)