Woven Banana Fiber Bowls (2023)

Banana Fiber, Indigo-Dyed
Set of 3, approx. 6” W each

This set of three handwoven bowls is made from banana fiber and dipped in natural indigo. Each bowl is slightly different—subtle variations in form, size, and depth give the set a sense of quiet movement and rhythm.

Crafted using banana fibers, and dyed in an indigo vat fed with banana peels — a source of fructose that sustains the natural fermentation process. By using the banana both as material and as a metabolic agent in the dyeing process, the work draws attention to the ways natural resources are entangled with systems of value, labor, and survival.

This gesture is a deliberate reflection on the Caribbean's colonial and post-colonial economic histories, in which the banana looms large as both crop and symbol. Known as “green gold,” bananas were at the heart of exploitative plantation economies across the region — fueling the rise of foreign trade empires while subjecting local communities to extractive labor systems and political subjugation. The fruit became not just sustenance, but a vehicle for empire.

By forming the banana fiber into bowls — simple, everyday domestic objects — the work brings the legacies of these imperial dynamics into the realm of the intimate and the familiar. The bowl, often associated with nourishment, home, and care, becomes a site of contradiction: it holds, but also implicates; it comforts, but also critiques.

This duality speaks to a broader truth about the Caribbean — where the traces of colonial power still shape daily life, and where the domestic sphere itself can reflect global histories of displacement, survival, and resistance. The work asserts that these dynamics are not distant or abstract, but lived and embedded in the textures of the ordinary.