PAMELLA ALLEN CREATIVE

Xaymaca From Mountains to Sea~Mixed Media Earthworks on Canvas ©️Pamella Allen 2025.

Xaymaca From Mountains Sea/Finding Mother in the Motherland

Mixed Media Earthworks on Canvas ©️Pamella Allen 2025.

This new series of Mixed Media Earthworks in relief are visual findings to a creative journey back “home” to the place of my birth in Jamaica called Xaymaca by the Arawak. Seeking some knowledge of my late mother who perished in my infancy by walking where she walked, the attempt is to embody some connection to my maternal lineage through the naturescapes and the people of this “Isle of Springs” in the “Land of Wood and Water”. In these Abstract Expressionist works, I investigate place, memory, knowledge lost and found in the language of nature, object & symbolism.

In a continuation of my decades long process of making mixed media earthworks on (and off) canvas, I am using organic and inorganic artifacts, finds collected on my walks along coastlines and mountains, throughout the island of jamaica. Many are remnants of discarded remains of living beings like the lightening whelk conch shells, feathers, fan coral, sea moss, bamboo, cacoon & “donkeys eye” seeds, quartz sand and stone layered with hand-made paper made with fibers from the banana, coconut, hemp and Malabar plum trees. All of these artifacts collaborate in my compositions to tell a story of place, moment, memory and the cyclical nature of life death life, which are recurring themes in my works. The deconstructed book pages speak to words and ancestral knowledge about my maternal and paternal lineage that are lost to time, an experience shared by many Jamaicans. The botanical mono prints are taken from breadfruit leaves and climbing vines near my studio in St Mary. 

This is the first full series of works that I have created here in Jamaica and they  speak to the raw stunning resilience of these lands and its people. A finding that I have made is that true to my earliest memories, like the hummingbird, the dragonfly, bamboo and Fern Gully, a natural mystic reverberates from this sacred ground through each one of my Jamaican people, like poetry, it is a harmony that runs like rivers from the mountains to the sea.

Portraits, Mandalas & Hand Made Paperworks

About Portraits of Souls~Deconstructed Drawings/The First Lines & Mixed Media Paintings on Canvas

Everything begins with the first lines. 

En route to creating the compositions for my mixed media portraits and nature studies, 

I always make a number of graphite drawings on rice-paper, in this process I have created a great many over the years. Driven by the sheer volume of drawings I have amassed and in keeping with my process of appropriating my own works and mirroring the cyclical nature of life, death life; I felt compelled to deconstruct my drawings, along with prints & paintings. With my deconstructed drawings, I create new compositions on canvas with abstract backgrounds that I have layered with acrylic paint, rice paper, parchment paper, encaustic paint, sometimes sand, and mixed media; in this process I am chasing different color values and textures. In this multi-layered process there is both chance and intention in the interactions of each deconstructed and abstracted compositional element that manifests in a new image,

a new window into the subject, humanity.

About the Mandalas: To create this series of mixed media paintings, I have appropriated the ritual, therapeutic and storytelling use of the mandala in cultures throughout history from Africa, to Asia and the Americas. To make My Mandalas, I use my own artifacts and archetypal images, the motion of repetitive form, the written word, and earth elements such as sand and soil to create a landscape grounded in the mystic of nature.

The desire is to make a place of "one-ness" in the process of creating these works that translates to the viewer as a place of inspired peace, a place of meditation.

EARTHWORKS

I create my on-site earthworks with elements that I find in local ecoscapes around the world so each earthwork is an honoring of the natural world and a self portrait of that landscape and its people, a kind of storytelling - a visual history told with the bones and discarded homes of sentient beings..

The Language of Listening Image & Prose By Pamella Allen