Son[i]a #444
Ebony G. Patterson
![Son[i]a #444](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/DSCF9372-1280x822.png)
Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981, Kingston, Jamaica) is an expansive artist working across painting, tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. Her practice is opulent and densely layered, built from glitter, sequins, fabric, faux flowers, jewelry, and found objects. This rich materiality becomes a seductive lure that draws viewers toward the marginalized realities and disenfranchised communities her work refuses to let disappear. In her lush environments, beauty and excess mask unsettling truths—a garden hides vultures, a vibrant portrait bears the trace of violence.
In this podcast, Ebony G. Patterson reflects on the paradoxes that animate her practice and how she uses them to entice -and unsettle- the viewer. Drawing on pop culture, art history, and pageantry, Ebony G. Patterson confronts social and racial inequality and the persistent brutality embedded in postcolonial and working-class spaces. Her work blurs the boundaries between high art and bling, between adornment and the grotesque, and memorializes those rendered “un-visible.” She also revisits her early days as an undergraduate student at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica, her moving back and forth to the United States, and her ongoing negotiation with labels of Blackness and “Jamaican-ness,” as she follows her own guiding voices and embraces discomfort, grief, and the Trojan-horse possibilities of her work.
With the support
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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