Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti

Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti
^{2021
Cyanotype on BFK Rives Paper
15” x 22”
Edition: 50
Commissioned by: Oolite Arts, Shares Program}

Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti is a cyanotype print edition by Valdés that deepens her exploration of water as both a material and mnemonic medium, one that holds, transmits, and preserves the legacies of colonial trade, migration, and memory. In this series, Valdés photographs the undersides of porcelain objects, manufactured in global centers in East Asia, and digitally arranges them to appear as if adrift within a vast, aqueous field. Rendered in the deep indigo of the cyanotype process, these artifacts seem suspended in oceanic space, referencing the maritime circulation of goods across colonial and imperial trade routes.

By focusing on the unglamorous undersides of these ceramic wares, Valdés surfaces what is often hidden: manufacturers’ marks, export labels, and geopolitical traces that connect these everyday objects to histories of transoceanic exchange. The composition and title of the work—Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, signal a shift in geographic emphasis: from the point of origin to the point of impact. These Caribbean nations, shaped by centuries of forced labor, settler extraction, and plantation economies, become the historical lens through which the global movement of objects is reframed.

The work draws on the histories of the China Trade and the triangular transatlantic economy that linked Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It examines how porcelain, once a luxury item, became a symbol of refinement, domestic aspiration, and social mobility in colonial households. In particular, Valdés highlights the economic roles women played in purchasing such goods, shaping domestic interiors while also participating in the larger mechanisms of trade and class formation. For emerging mestizo classes in the colonies, these wares were not merely functional; they were markers of status and belonging within a rapidly stratifying society.

Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti urges viewers to consider what lies beneath the surface, both materially and historically. The cyanotype process, with its reliance on water, sunlight, and chemical transformation, mirrors the themes of immersion and visibility at the core of the work. Water becomes both subject and substrate: a site through which trauma, trade, and identity circulate across time and territory.

This project extends Valdés’s broader engagement with diasporic memory, material culture, and colonial legacies. Like her sculptural series Thirst, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti transforms the ordinary into the archival, offering the underside of a ceramic plate not just as a surface, but as a map of global entanglements. In doing so, it affirms the Caribbean as not merely a recipient of goods but as a generative site of resistance, complexity, and historical consciousness.

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