SHEENA ROSE ON SIMONE ASIA
Born in 1990, Simone Asia is a Barbadian artist whose oeuvre includes pen and ink and mixed media drawings. Asia’s drawings of hybrid celestial figures express her personal experiences and engage themes of love, trauma, and gender roles. In the creation of her alternate worlds, she uses dreams, geomancy, and her personal journals as source material.
The alternate worlds are her way of escape from her reality and reveal her state of mind of anxiety, reflection, and hope. Informed by her dreams and journal entries, Asia constructs and adds detailed lines that surround the portrait and create ornate landscapes.
In her work Isolation (2017), one of her hybrid figures appears exhausted under the weight of twigs, feathers, and organic forms, all tangled together in the shape of a headpiece. Within the seemingly unmanageable tangle, there are intricate lines and clustered forms. On the left side of the canvas, there is a small black moon, which may signal an escape for the hybrid seeking to release its burden.
Escapism is a recurring theme in many of Asia’s works. For Asia and many of my fellow Barbadian artists, living in an idyllic tourist destination often pigeonholes creatives into making what some may call “tourist art.” Instead of portraying the beach, coconut trees, and green monkeys, Asia’s work aims to portray a truth that is closer to her own experience as a young Black woman. As a Black Barbadian female artist, I too can relate to her quest for self-worth and self-discovery. For so many of us, the isolation caused by living outside of major art hubs and the veils of false smiles maintained for tourists can be mentally exhausting. Asia uses her craft to seek understanding and to demand an opportunity to be appreciated as an artist, human, Black woman, and someone that matters.
Simone Asia
Isolation, 2017
Pen and ink, 25" x 30"
Image courtesy of the artist
ROSE