Akilah Watts, Alanis Forde, Anna Gibson – Arcadia: Often Dreamt, Seldom Lived

The Verena Kerfin Gallery is proud to present a group exhibition featuring three emerging voices from Barbados: Alanis Forde, Anna Gibson, and Akilah Watts. Arcadia: Often Dreamt, Seldom Lived brings together three distinct painterly approaches that engage with themes of identity, memory, and cultural self-understanding.

At the heart of their work lies an exploration of the body, belonging, and the friction between individual experience and collective history. The artists question how womanhood, home, and self-image are shaped in the Caribbean — navigating inherited colonial narratives, generational memory, and contemporary visibility.

Each artist employs her own visual language: from figurative painting to surreal compositions and collage-like textures. What unites them is a critical engagement with the idea of paradise — not as an external ideal, but as a layered, psychological, and cultural space.

Together, Forde, Gibson, and Watts offer a nuanced, empathetic, and powerful reflection on contemporary Afro-Caribbean life beyond exoticism and stereotype.