The Passing: The Evocative Worlds of Ebony Patterson’s Dancehall Egúngún

Abstract

Abstract:In 2010, Jamaican artist Ebony Patterson lost her father. This shifted her art significantly, and she recalls that, for the first time, she began to work with death in her practice. Her new body of work, elegantly ornamented tapestries, evokes spectral disembodied figures, elaborately coiffed and assembled with glitter, plastic, cotton, and glass. What is unexpected about the complicated tapestry of ideas in Patterson’s work is that, through its use of cloth to memorialize death, it offers an evocative connection to the use of adornment and clothing in dancehall culture and its connection to both Jonkonnu and Egúngún masquerade traditions. My analysis of Patterson’s work looks at the prominence of cloth and ornamentation in Egúngún masquerade traditions in Nigeria and within the cultural sphere of the Jamaican Jonkonnu masquerades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This analysis links the expensive and abundant uses of cloth in the design of highly embellished Nigerian Egúngún costumes to similar traditions within Jamaican Jonkonnu masking and argues that the aesthetics of both traditions (in the form of adorned maskers) creates a body that acts as an agent of social control, communicating important ideas about kinship, masculinity, wealth, violence, and death. Through this examination of excessively embellished cloth and its historical connection to memorializing kinship connections, solidifying community relations, and simultaneously communicating wealth, aggression, and a hypermasculinity, I suggest that not only is Patterson creating Egúngún with her work but that our understanding of the popular expressive culture of men’s fashion within dancehall culture is not a feminized expression at all, but a hypermasculine Africanized expression which champions flamboyant and excessively adorned expressions of dress, while at the same time solidifying community kinships, exhibiting wealth, and memorializing the deceased.