Home on the Waves: Museum Collections and Caribbean Tidalectics with Professor Marsha Pearce

Why It Matters

The tidelctic framework reshapes museum practice, fostering inclusive spaces that reflect the fluid, transnational realities of Caribbean and Global Majority communities.

Key Takeaways

• Caribbean "tidelctic" philosophy reframes museum as fluid, home-like space.
• Exhibition showcases millennial artists using water-inspired media to explore identity.
• Old woman sweeping sand becomes metaphor for agency amid colonial histories.
• Works blend steel, watercolor, digital maps to visualize migration and belonging.
• Pearce links Caribbean epistemology to curatorial practice and public engagement.

Summary

Professor Marsha Pearce’s lecture, “Home on the Waves: Museum Collections and Caribbean Tidectics,” reframes the museum as a living, fluid home for Global Majority artists. Drawing on Caribbean‑rooted philosophies, she introduces the concept of “tidelctic” thinking—a mode that embraces paradox, flux, and the sea as both metaphor and methodology, challenging Western dialectic rigidity.

Pearce anchors her argument in a recent exhibition at Y Art Gallery, featuring seven millennial creators whose practices are steeped in water‑inspired media. The show interrogates belonging, migration, and digital connectivity, using steel sculptures, watercolor mangrove depictions, and satellite‑map distortions to render the Caribbean’s liquid ontology. Each work embodies the tidal rhythm of diaspora, from Giovana Hadid’s steel‑pan echoing ocean currents to Shannon Alonzo’s fluid pigments that dissolve fixed notions of place.

The lecture weaves literary and visual examples, notably Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poem of an old woman sweeping sand—reimagined as sweeping waves—to illustrate agency within colonial legacies. Pearce highlights Hadid’s “Sound of the Sea” installation, Alonzo’s embroidered mangrove roots, Simone Kennedy Doy’s bar‑scene narratives, and Stanton Taylor’s Google‑Maps‑based “Perspective Study,” all of which translate the Caribbean’s tidal logic into tangible art forms.

By positioning the museum as a home that moves with the tides, Pearce proposes new curatorial strategies that prioritize relational, fluid collections and public engagement. This approach promises more inclusive acquisition policies, deeper community resonance, and a reimagined role for cultural institutions in supporting diaspora identities.

Original Description

This talk is structured in two waves. First, it centres the 2026 exhibition, By These Shores I Was Born, curated by Professor Pearce and installed in Trinidad and Tobago. Ideas of home and belonging are unpacked though visual analyses of work by seven contemporary artists who have moved in and out of the Caribbean, and by way of reflections on Barbadian poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of tidalectics – a psychology and ontological state that has a marine rhythm and contrasts with Western dialectics. The session’s second wave is propelled by the questions: How might these artists’ aesthetic engagements inform museology? How might museum’s rethink collecting practices in ways that are more inclusive? What does it mean to be at home in a museum’s collection? A thesis of tidal action is advanced as a critical methodology.

This event is organised by Daisy Gould, with the support of Professor Dorothy Price, Executive Dean and Deputy Director, the Courtauld.