The Warmington Gallery hosts Joscelyn Gardner’s intervention, A Topsy-Turvy Plantation Home (2003-4). Here, audio, video, and object “interference” into the rooms of this Gallery set out to explore female roles and relationships within the eighteenth-century Great House at the site of (re)-staged patriarchal power and hint at suppressed emotions that may have simmered below the well-ordered surface.

Speak, Dolly, Speak - In the Bedroom, projected onto the mattress of the imposing four-poster bed, the image of a (white) child’s hands flipping a cross-racial topsy-turvy doll back and forth as she sings to herself, poignantly alludes to the interchangeability of (sexual) roles by the women of the house.

Nanny - In the Nursery, the insertion of a rocking chair with the printed image of a Nanny holding her charge, together with the sound of a female voice singing a slave lullaby to a male infant, belies the irony of the role of the Nanny who often both suckled the master and was forced to abandon her own child “in de cane-field”.

Home Sweet Home - In the Dining Room, the oil painting Portrait of Seale-Yearwood Esq. (c. 1730) has been removed from the Museum’s storage and placed over the mahogany sideboard. The inclusion of this portrait into the home’s chief display rooms would have both satisfied the master’s desire to and served as a reminder to his wife of his sexual indiscretions.

In the Drawing Room, an embroidered handkerchief and a pair of needlework scissors are carefully placed on the sofa below the marriage portraits of Mr. Samuel Brown and Mrs Samuel Brown. The observation that in the former portrait the sitter’s right eye appears to have been poked out where the canvas is torn, together with an emotional dialogue overheard between a mother and daughter, subtly suggests female desire to escape the rigid discipline of patriarchal / colonial rule. These scenarios point to the inevitable slippages behind the façade of plantation role-playing.

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