The role of the artist is and has always been uniquely difficult, impossible even. To capture a world that is ever fugitive and constantly evolving. In a way, it echoes the diaspora experience, trying to gather seeds that had long blown away in various directions. María Magdalena Campos-Pons, from Matanzas in Cuba, has been a practising artist for almost 50 years now, constantly fine-tuning and expanding her practice to think about the world and her role within it. Her approach has always been multi and inter disciplinary; photography, painting, printmaking, video, sound, performance, sculpture, installation. Whatever the work requires. And what is the work? It feels like a bid to capture the unique magic of what it means for us to be here existing. All the things that had to happen to lead to this moment; our ancestors, our gods, our planet, our trees, our water. Her art is a manifestation of the spiritual miracles that we might sometimes see as mundane. Her identity and being have often been the driving forces behind her work. She is a Cuban artist living and working in Nashville, Tennessee, with Yoruba ancestry via her family that came from Nigeria to Matanzas to work on the sugar fields. She also has Chinese ancestry. Her work has always tried to uncover the links between people, geography and communities across continents and generations. How is an identity formed? What are the things that continue to weave the world together? 

Of late, artists that have primarily concerned themselves with the human experience, often through portraiture, have turned to nature, flowers in particular. It is not new, that when the technological innovations and possibilities become so overwhelmingly endless, the artist returns to nature for grounding. It happened with the Impressionists, where the invention of the camera threatened the jobs of working painters, and so they began the admirable task of attempting to capture outdoor atmosphere in a way that photographs would never be able to. They moved away from studios and began to work outside, observing the difference between the objective lens of a camera and the subjective human eye. The camera surely could not smell the green of a dewy morning or observe the change of light from one minute to the next. Now, we are contending with a double doom, the potential of technology to completely render us and our abilities redundant, as well as the rapid overheating of our planet, due to our carelessness for the environment. 

For some artists from Africa and its diaspora, the turn to nature is also about flexing their versatility, refusing to be pigeonholed within the genre of Black portraiture. I would not class Campos-Pons within this new trend of artists— she has nothing to prove in that sense. But, her work has always been about the interconnectivity between humans, their histories and the world they inhabit. In I am Soil. My Tears Are Water the artist addresses with urgency our need to consider the spiritually symbiotic relationship between a person and nature. She explores the importance of plants and animals around us, and their ability to provide us with healing properties, if only we give them the chance to breathe.

Hers is a hyper empathetic practice, often using her own body to take on the pains that others have faced, whether it is her ancestors or victims of police violence such as Breonna Taylor. And in this series of works, we see this extended to the natural world. In some of the paintings, her lens can be almost scientific, as if she is painting diagrams of plants. She allows herself to take a back seat to the innate architecture that nature already possesses. But the colours There is also an importance in the choice of subject; she depicts plants of specific significance, and with healing properties, in the transatlantic slave trade and its subsequent diaspora. Here, she paints the heliconia plant, the hibiscus flower, sugarcane stalks, guava leaves and corn fields. Her use of watercolour brings a softness to the images, with the colours bleeding into each other and intermingling in a way that is reflective of the point that she is making as she paints: everything and everybody is connected. It is also an intentional tool to represent interconnectivity, with the artist thinking about the way that watercolour soaks into the paper and becomes a part of it. In one work, Campos-Pons combines photography with painting, to the extent that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the two mediums. The method echoes theories of hybridity; that syncretism and blending are essential to post-colonial identity formation. 

The sensation of migration is felt in the movement that these images portray. In her paintings of corn fields, the plants seem to sway; you can feel the breeze moving through the green. In some of these works, there is a sense of the plants wanting to escape from the plane. Her sugar canes grow so tall that the page cannot contain them. The heliconias feel like they will grow endlessly towards the ground. This is the wonderful tension of this series; the artist’s desire to depict elements of the natural world, alongside her submission to its awesomeness, an admission that it cannot be repressed or subdued. 

This is then juxtaposed with the Sugar/Bittersweet, the sculptural installation made up of found spears from Sharjah, and ‘sugar’ disks made from glass. The long spears pointing towards the sky echo the long sugar cane stalks in the watercolour paintings. But, the installation, a meditation on the sugar trade that forced her ancestors from Nigeria to Cuba, provides a stark contrast to the watercolours on the wall. It reminds us of the darkness of human potential, how we can distort the natural world for our own greed. 

The presence of humans is emphasised in their absence on the pictorial planes. The idea of cyclicality is what drives the show, that everything is relative and connected regardless of geographical location. No one thing can exist without the other. Campos-Pons chooses to focus on works on paper here, also thinking about the material as a way of returning to the cycle. In some ways the absence of humans can feel cautionary, that the consequences of our invisible actions are felt every day on the environment. It forces us to reckon with the marks of human impact on our surroundings. Everything is cyclical, it will catch up with us. 

Campos-Pons’ work is always about diaspora, about our inter-connectivity across geographic borders. These are flora species that are found across the world, from her ancestral home in Nigeria, to Cuba, to the Middle East where this exhibition takes place. They are reflective of the multiplicity of her identity and her lived experience. The flora present a centering of sorts, a unifying sign that we are all living on the same planet, under the same sun. Seeds are often used as a metaphor for diaspora, for the gentle blowing of life from one end of the world to another, entering new worlds and growing whilst retaining their essence. 

While choosing the flowers portrayed in these works, Campos-Pons thought about her first hibiscus drink in Senegal, a flower that she saw dotted all over her childhood in Cuba. Also in Cuba, the heliconia plant is offered to Sango, the Yoruba deity of thunder and lightning, because of its colours. The tradition that travelled all the way from the Yorubas of West Africa, through the transatlantic slave trade, still remains in Matanzas, Cuba. Similarly, she paints the sugar cane, which is really the reason for it all. It is why slaves were forced across the Atlantic. She thinks of these plants as “historical conduits of geography”, markers that carry within them so much of our cultural histories. 

In the history of art, there has been a somewhat stereotypical assumption that the work of artists of African descent was imbued with magic. When we consider Campos-Pons and her work, we must do so with an understanding of her rigorous and traditional training as an artist and art historian at the Escuela Nacional de Arte and the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. But this is not antithetical to an understanding of the spirituality of the world; in fact, the artist is constantly trying to define the materiality of spirituality. Campos-Pons is very clear that her work is always an amalgamation of many things; her history, her artistic training, her movement through the world, and the transcendence of making. There is an alchemy to the process of making art that she sees reflected in the natural world. She retains a sense of awe at the natural processes that take place everyday for the world to exist as it is—the sun rising, the seeds spreading, the plants growing, the flowers blooming, the fruit yielding. 

In some ways it is a metaphor for her purpose as an artist, an overwhelming need to understand and appreciate our presence in this dimension. This series can feel like an attempt to freeze the magic of the present moment, to give some kind of materiality to the transience of life. She has often worked in the medium of photography, and these watercolour paintings can sometimes feel like a painterly photograph, capturing an ephemeral moment and trying to make it eternal