Artist Talk with Roberta Stoddart

Central to Roberta Stoddart's artistic practice is seeking to make sense of Caribbean pathologies. What becomes urgent is the process of authentically mapping her own original and unique journey of awakening and healing. By doing so, Stoddart hopes to stimulate conversations around what is universal. She considers many questions throughout her work, in her endeavour to understand and survive deeply felt historical wounds and everyday tensions. 

This artist talk and conversation with Stoddart will follow an exploration of the character of Antoinette Cosway, or Bertha, a White creole outcast incapable of belonging to the Europe of her ancestors or to Jamaica, her birthplace. Englishman Edward Rochester weds Bertha and refashions her into a raving madwoman on their honeymoon. Back in England, Rochester locks her away in his attic. She becomes completely unhinged, exposing herself as a deranged exile who has lost touch with her authentic self.

On the surface, Bertha can fit neatly into a confluence of themes that form the bedrock of Caribbean social, political, and cultural society and institutions. But Bertha cannot simply be reduced to a perpetrator of atrocities against the enslaved, to solely a woman of privilege or to predictable feminine stereotypes. Bertha is also a victim of an oppressive patriarchal society.

Tickets will be available online soon.

Roberta Stoddart was born in Jamaica in 1963. She obtained her undergraduate and post-graduate diplomas in Visual Arts in Australia. She lives and works in Trinidad. Roberta’s paintings have been described as brave, dense, bold, thoroughly executed, and deeply felt. Intense and disturbing, they stimulate questions about our collective prejudices, our psychological spaces, and our notions of belonging. 

She has published two books, Seamless Spaces (2000) and The Storyteller (2007), and produced seven solo exhibitions, one of which was Domestic Harmony (1995), Grosvenor Galleries, Jamaica; and most recently in Trinidad being Seamless Spaces (2000), Caribbean Contemporary Arts (CCA7), In The Flesh (2007), National Museum and Art Gallery, Indigo (2014) and The Tear Catcher (2018) at Y Gallery. 

Roberta has participated in important local, regional, and international group shows, including The Third Biennial of Painting of the Caribbean and Central America (1996), Dominican Republic; Lips, Sticks and Marks (1998) in Barbados and Trinidad, a groundbreaking Caribbean travelling exhibition comprised of 7 women; Politicas de la Diferencia (2001/2), curated by Kevin Power, Spain and Argentina; A Suitable Distance, Impressions of Trinidad by five artists (2006), Soft Box Studios, Trinidad; Three Painters (2008), curated by Susanne Fredricks in Jamaica; and Self Consciousness (2010), curated by Hilton Als and Peter Doig, Werner Gallery, Berlin, Germany, and The Shadow Show (2023), curated by Ashraph in Trinidad. 

She participated in the Small Axe Caribbean Modernism II Symposium (2024) in Puerto Rico, organized by David Scott and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario. The Wereldmuseum, Netherlands, acquired Roberta’s painting “Sleepwalkers” (2009-2017) in 2026 for their permanent collection and their upcoming exhibition Leef Surrealisme in Rotterdam (2026).

She is the recipient of the Life of Jamaica Art Scholarship (1991), and a Peoples’ Choice prize (1999) at the XXX eme Festival International de la Peinture, Cagnes-sur Mer, France.

Leef Surrealisme shifts the viewer's gaze from understanding Surrealism solely as a European art movement, but instead, as a global way of thinking, dreaming, and resisting. Artists from different continents use surrealist images to ask questions about power, identity, and freedom. Leef Surrealisme brings together works by international artists, from Mexico, Australia, Jamaica, and Indonesia, among others. 

Works of art from the collection of the Wereldmuseum are combined with (international) loans and work by contemporary Rotterdam artists. A specific emphasis is also made on the city of Rotterdam as a world harbor: a surrealist meeting point.