Imna Arroyo
New London, CT
Imna Arroyo is an Afro-Puerto Rican artist whose work weaves the threads of heritage and ecological veneration into a contemporary artistic dialogue.
Message
Yemaya is a multimedia installation consisting of The Many Faces of Yemaya and the House of Yemaya. Both of which were created as singular works that also work together as a combined installation.
The Many Faces of Yemaya is dedicated to the Yoruba Oricha, Yemonja also known as Yemaya - Goddess of the Sea. As the title suggests she is emblematic of the Ocean. The accompanying video and the woodcut prints invoke the seven avatar-paths of the goddess in Yoruba beliefs. Various manifestations of water, the sea, rivers, foam, the depths are acoustically referenced in the video through recorded sounds of the various waters. The installation includes seven, 8.4 x 2.75 foot woodcut prints on satin fabric, framed in batik fabric from Ghana, West Africa, as well as additional metallic fabric, hand-made and printed abaca paper, shells, sea stars, crystals, and wood also representing the oceans. Each panel depicts “los siete caminos de Yemaya the seven paths taken by the Yoruba Orisha Yemaya: Yemaya Achaba, Yemayá Akuará, Yemayá Awoyo, Yemayá Okuté, Yemayá Asesú, Yemayá Konlá and Yemayá Mayoleo.
In the House of Yemaya the artist presents Yemaya living in the bottom of the sea with Olokun, her father and the owner and master of the ocean. Yemaya is shown as a mermaid on the inside of the house and as the Virgin of Mercy /La Virgen de Regla on the outside. The house is composed of six large woodcuts, printed on satin and framed with batik fabric, to create the three walls that anchor the house. Waves made of cloth, embellished with beads, shimmering glass and shells comprise the floor installation.
In Yoruba cosmology, the Orisha Olokun is said to either be the father of Yemaya or an aspect of Yemaya. They live together at the bottom of the ocean. Olokun’s main function is to bring equilibrium. Olokun provides the essence of life -- shelter and nourishment -- to many of Earth’s creatures.
Puerto Rican artist devoted to exploring connections between the African continent and the Diaspora in an on-going endeavor to reclaim a lost and scattered heritage. Arroyo draws upon the imagery, symbolism and language of the Yoruba traditions of Africa to express a majestically complex and sophisticated worldview. In her multidisciplinary practice, she finds inspiration in the concept that art-making can be a ritualized form of healing.
"It is my intent to create Art that heals the deep-seated collective wounds of history, as well as to celebrate the vibrancy and relevance of a long denied ancestral legacy of self-expression", Imna Arroyo
Renowned scholar and Caribbean art and cultural critic, Yolanda Wood writes “… Imna Arroyo remains continually focused on those junctures where everything that is located outside the practices of hegemonic power, in the domains of the undervalued and subaltern, somehow meets. Settling within the space/time of these multiple references, she has inserted her own poetics based on life stories, autobiographical details, gender imprints, and the memories that inhabit them, all inscribed on the skin and in the reflections of the African subjects enslaved in times of modernity/coloniality and their descendants—which in fact we all are—and whose condition of existence the Barbadian writer George Lamming has identified as “a historical experience” in the Caribbean, yet one that certainly extends beyond the dominion of the plantations. From her migrant status, yet the bearer of a U.S. passport, Arroyo has succeeded in penetrating these silenced and hidden areas”.