What a whirlwind 🧚🏽♀️💥 Some of the local and international press for The Wound is a Portal✨Finally updated my website, you can check these out at the link in my bio 💃🏽
#stillpinchingmyself #thewoundisaportal #gesiye #caribbeanart #lifeiswild
We belong to the land ✨🍃
A short clip from my film, The Wound is a Portal, currently showing @museumwales .
Really excited to share that there will be a public screening of the film here in Trinidad 🥳 This work is for us and our island, I can’t wait for you all to see it. Stay tuned for more info 🇹🇹❤️🔥
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Giving thanks for my amazing collaborators and creative team 🤲🏽🌞
Participants: Robbie Price, Safiya Hoyte, Adam ‘Mar” Andrews, Alicia Viarruel, Dawn-Marie Alexander, Kevon Samuel, Nadine Marshall-Joseph, Joan Ballantyne
Clay sculpting by @shoyteart
Photographer @luigicreese
Composer @neonpantha
DP @mikhail.makes
2nd cam @avielmusik868
Location Sound Recordist @jelaniserrette
Voiceover Recording @pomegranatestudios
Aerials @renaldo868 & @dronesolutions.tt
Production Manager @intayabiz
Production Assistant @neisha.rahamut
Location @ajoupagardens & Blue Basin
Researcher @timi_ebi
Interviewer @triniwildindian
Colour Grading @shanedhos
Styling @suelynchoo
Designers @qratebykalois & @meilinginc
Written, Directed & Edited by yours truly
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#caribbeanart #magicalrealism #trinidadianartist #contemporarytattooing #environmentalart #performanceart #contemporaryart #coloniallegacy #reframingpicton #gesiye #thewoundisaportal #portals #ancestralland #home #belonging #connection
Tattooing as ritual, as an offering. Connecting land and body at the Pitch Lake 🖤
Short clip from my new video work ✨
So Will I Turn Her Virtue Into Pitch (2026)
Big thank you to my incredible crew in Trinidad 🥳 @iamkamali_@mikhail.makes@stefchenko@pomegranatestudios 🫶🏽
#wip #caribbeanart #tattooingmyself
Thank you to @ellielachs for her thoughtful consideration of my work in her text for the Anatomy of a Map group show at @greatorexstreet_e1 ✨
“Gesiye’s So Will I Turn Her Virtue Into Pitch touches the core of this expanded idea of the map. Her film lingers over Trinidad’s Pitch Lake, the world’s largest natural tar deposit, revealing a surface marked by ridges, planes and pools that recall the contours of a traditional map. Rather than treating the landscape as something to be surveyed from a dispassionate and impersonal birds-eye view that we so readily associate with the map-maker, Gesiye situates herself inside it, tattooing her bare legs upon the lake. The Pitch Lake has long been a site of extraction: first exploited under British colonial rule, its tar was used to waterproof ships and later to pave roads across the Empire, including many in London. The lake continually regenerates itself, making it seem untouched even as it is endlessly mined; a surface that keeps being extracted, while remaining a wellspring of spirit and belonging for those who live amongst it.
In this, there is a metaphor for the Black diasporic experience: the simultaneous endurance, renewal and external demand placed upon a body and a land. Gesiye extends this metaphor through the act of tattooing. The lines she inks onto her skin become a kind of map, marking her encounter with the place, charting sensations and memory, and offering a guide back to her own body. These markings hold her dual identity across countries, tracing a personal geography where heritage and movement overlay one another like shifting terrain.“
-written by Ellie Lachs
#sowilliturnhervirtueintopitch #tattooingmyself #performanceart #videoart #pitchlake
Lots of work in the past few months, and lots more to go as I prep for my degree show at the end of my MFA at @sladeschool ✨ sleepy & grateful 🥰
Thank u to everyone who’s been supporting this journey, listening to me talk through ideas, collaborating with me, donating to the go fund me, coming by for studio visits, and giving me opportunities to share my work 🫶🏽
Anatomy of a Map is now open at @greatorexstreet_e1 until April 27th ✨ I’m showing three works in this group show: So Will I Turn Her Virtue Into Pitch (2026), I am You: Cartographies of Connection (2025) and Spirit Body Moving (2025).
Big thank you everyone who came through to see the show, to @jess_heritage and @geoffalaplage for install support and to @ellielachs and @cleo_sttzkr for their curation. So grateful to be showing alongside this group of five interdisciplinary artists.
The show is open every day till the 27th from 11am to 6pm.
Install photos by @abrphotogragraphy
Anatomy of a Map is now open to the public 11-6pm, everyday until Monday 27th. Thank you to all who joined for the opening last night!
Anatomy of a Map explores ‘mapping’ as a creative act that mediates, among other things, ideas of heritage, land, and the body. The exhibition brings together five interdisciplinary artists working across installation, film, painting, and textile, to draw the practice of mapping away from fixed systems of orientation and control, to a more personal and fluid framework. Here, they consider how environments impress themselves upon the body, forming new maps and identities across borders, and time.
Thursday 23rd: 11am - 6pm
Friday 24th: 11am - 6pm
Saturday 25th: 11am - 6pm
Sunday 26th: 11am - 6pm
Monday 27th: 11am - 5pm
Address: GREATOREX, 10 Greatorex St, London E1 5NF
@gesiye@cocoemmanuelle@cleo_sttzkr@barvotextil@studio_danele
Curators @ellielachs and @cleo_sttzkr
Drinks sponsored by @trip.drinks
Photography by @abrphotogragraphy phy
My London bookings are currently open, come get tattooed by me at @yaba.ldn ❤️🔥✍🏽🌞
May is almost booked up but I have appointments available in April & this summer, and I’m doing a flash day at the end of the month, will share more about that soon 😘
Excited to share that I’ll be showing new work in a group exhibition later this month in London ✨ opening night is April 22nd from 6-9pm so come through if you’re around! Grateful to be included alongside these artists, big thank you to @ellielachs , @cleo_sttzkr & @greatorexstreet_e1 💙
Anatomy of a Map explores the process of mapping as a creative act that mediates ideas of heritage, land, and the body. Bringing together five interdisciplinary artists who work across mediums of film, painting, drawing, and textile, the exhibition draws the practice of mapping away from fixed systems of orientation and control. It suggests a more personal, fluid framework where environments impress themselves upon the body and identities are formed across borders, time, and diasporic histories.
#caribbeanartist #videoart #tattooing
My first multi-channel video work, I am You: Cartographies of Connection (2025) made at the beginning of my second year of my MFA at @sladeschool 🌀 Using the ritual of tattooing to honour the friendship between @jam1llionaire and @spice.mystic 🤲🏽
Filmed in London with the sweetest team of collaborators and participants✨
Director, Editor, Photographer, Tattoo Artist: Gesiye
Participants: Jamila Versi & Randa Toko
Creative Producer: Hamed Maiye
Cinematographer: Adenike Oke
Colourist: Dedula Kumalo
Original Music by Avila Do Espírito Santo
“A welcome opaqueness, through which the other escapes me”- Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
Big thank u to @_lizharrington & @yangenhume for supporting these cyanotype experiments at @sladeschool 🤲🏽✨💙
