Minshall's "Jouvay: The Rising Sun" and "Dancing Mosaic Hummingbird"

Jouvay: The Rising Sun is the design for a mural commissioned by Barbados Mutual insurance company, now Sagicor, for their Port of Spain headquarters on the western edge of the Queens Park Savannah. Minshall approached the design for the mural the way he would approach the design for a king mas: start with the engineering and the structure, which then informs the design and the decoration.

Combining references from the art form of mural design as well as from his own work in the mas, Minshall conceived a mural that would use a mosaic technique to display a detailed image, but a mosaic that would be light and alive, dancing like a mas, not cemented into place. Unlike ceramic tile mosaic, these “tiles” would be one-inch squares of translucent plastic (the coloured “gel” film used in theatrical lighting), dangling from plastic fasteners (“shot” on with fastener “guns,” used to fasten tags onto clothing). These tiles would hang from a grid of vertical tapes stretched taught the entire fifty-two foot height of the building’s atrium. (The related piece in this exhibition, Dancing Mosaic Hummingbird, is a mock-up of the construction technique for the mural.)

To create the design artwork, Minshall went through a painstaking process of creating his own range of coloured paper for collage. Since the image was to be executed inch by inch, in an array of individual “tiles,” he deployed a paint-splatter technique using stiff-bristled toothbrushes to create washes of colour comprised of tiny dots of paint, each dot to represent a mosaic square. From this stock of pointillist colours he meticulously cut out and collaged the three hummingbirds, bougainvillea, hibiscus, and foliage, each edged in gold, applied against a joyful palette of sunrise. With these techniques, the artist packed an extraordinary amount of precise detail into the 11” x 26” artwork. The completed mural, installed in the building’s atrium, features over 140,000 squares of coloured film, each corresponding to a tiny dot of paint in the original artwork.

The mural remains in place today, remarkably as fresh as the day it was finished in early 1992. It faces the rising sun in the east. As air currents pass over the surface of the mural, the hanging mosaic tiles rustle gently, giving the mural image a continual shimmer and dance.