Jasmine Thomas-Girvan

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan was born in1961 in Jamaica and has lived in Trinidad since 2000. A sculptor, trained in jewellery and textile design, she received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York. 

Drawing from Caribbean history, myth, ritual, literature, and her own experience, her work has evolved from intimately sized, often wearable objects, to large-scale installations with multimedia elements.  

Thomas-Girvan’s poetically inflected works are grounded in the specificity of the Caribbean landscape and the region’s colonial past, but open out into universal themes-most prominently, transformation and the construction of identity. Her sculptures and installations seamlessly weave together traditional materials, such as wood and bronze, with both found everyday objects and materials sourced from the natural environment. Palm fronds, calabashes, feathers and shells, culled from a collection that she has amassed over time often appear. The purposeful use of indigenous materials supports her ongoing praxis of inverse archeology. The magical realist elements evidenced within her works reference ancestral memories, indigenous African cosmologies and post-colonial regional politics. These elements when incorporated in her sculptures function as artefacts, repositories, and ciphers for the unique histories of the Americas. The resulting assemblages, which cohere into singular visual statements, are at once familiar and fantastical- venerating, exploring, and challenging our rich and contested histories.

She was the recipient of the Tiffany Honor Award for Excellence while studying at Parsons and also received a Commonwealth Foundation Arts Award in 1996. She received the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Aaron Matalon Award in 2012 and 2017, as the artist who made the most outstanding contribution to that year’s Jamaica Biennial. In 2014 she also received the Silver Musgrave Medal of The Institute of Jamaica. Thomas-Girvan has also made a number of public commissions, one of which was presented to the Queen of England. Her work has been exhibited in the US, Jamaica, Trinidad, Venezuela, Mexico and the UK.