In 1899, the British colonial administration in Jamaica passed a set of legislation known as the Public Gardens Regulation Act. Designed to systematize the maintenance of public spaces throughout the island, the act established a framework of policing and punishment on “any land maintained at public expense.” The act proclaimed that officers could seize stray animals found in the gardens, and allowed officials to deputize garden employees as “Special Constables” who could take offenders into custody. At the same time as the colonial garden was part of an elaborate performance of property and order, gardens of another kind abounded throughout the island. As the novelist Olive Senior notes in her exhibition essay, provision grounds, kitchen gardens, and yards all served as domestic spaces for poor and rural families to cultivate their own crops. Variously a surveilled public resource, a private space of nourishment, a site of portraiture and aspiration, the Jamaican garden has long been a contested terrain. In an exhibit now at Hales Gallery, artist Ebony G. Patterson explores the legacy of the garden as it echoes throughout the postcolony.Ebony G. Patterson,...a nest above, checkered shoes, beyond a green felt that candles no longer lit in garden in bloom, 2019.
