Jessica Ashman ‘Those that do not smile will kill me’: Decolonising Jamaican Flora

This February artist Jessica Ashman will present her new commission supported by the University of the Arts London Decolonising Institute’s 20/20 programme.

Since summer 2023 Ashman has been working with Bristol Museum & Art Gallery’s collections. She has researched archives from the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection and has explored specimens in the Natural History collection. She has produced a new multi-disciplinary installation, ’Those that do not smile will kill me’ Decolonising Jamaican Flora.

Ashman has been researching the collections of two 18th-century biologists, whose herbaria and archives are held in the museum. Arthur Broughton (1758-1796) accumulated flowers and plants in Jamaica in the 1780s and 90s and this herbarium is a resource for study of the botany on the island. The ‘pro-slavery priest’ John Lindsay (1729 -1788) settled in Jamaica in 1758. He produced an illustrated manuscript, depicting local flora and fauna . Both men relied on the knowledge of Africans enslaved on the island to develop their understanding and to aid in the collecting itself

Ashman has taken this line of enquiry further to explore how Indigenous and African-Jamaicans used plants to resist their enslavement: from growing for food to harvesting for poisons, hallucinogens, medicine and birth control. The title comes from a proverb that tells the danger of the Jamaican fruit, Ackee, part of Jamaica’s national dish, Ackee and Saltfish. If the fruit is not ripe, ie, does not split and ‘smile’, it is poisonous. Ashman questions the Enlightenment version of scientific investigation, the narrative that European colonisers owned this knowledge and the trauma of the extraction and exploitation of Jamaica’s natural resources and people.

Ashman’s paintings on silk give agency to the minute African figures who appear in Lindsay’s drawings. She posits an alternative narrative for the figures: from growing to feed and sell, to resistance and rebellion: Jamaica was known to have the highest number of uprisings during enslavement out of all of the Caribbean. Through immersive soundscapes and moving image, Ashman also seeks to imagine a utopia through the magic of growing and how the enslaved people of the island connected to their spirituality through the landscape of Jamaica. ‘Those that do not smile will kill me’ invites you to challenge perceptions around nature, botanical knowledge and who owns the rich natural resources on Earth.