Born in Barbados and based in Glasgow, Alberta Whittle represented Scotland in the 59th Venice Biennale and has exhibited widely, garnering widespread acclaim. An exhibition charting her career to date is on at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), Edinburgh. Her new exhibition at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, was spurred by reading the then-Makar Jackie Kay’s Ten Poems of Kindness – a themed selection of verse, which became a key touchstone for the artist while developing her first solo exhibition at the gallery.

This display centres on her personal response to the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, developing her unpicking of its connections to institutional racism and the climate emergency, incorporating her experience of family and aspects of Barbadian vernacular culture; it employs a multi-coloured palette evoking ‘the fiery sunsets and moody dawns of the Caribbean’ in the words of Daniella Rose King, whose newly-commissioned text accompanies the show. A new tapestry, Ring around the Rosy, woven by Dovecot Studios, is a centrepiece, while the familiar colourings of her work are present in ideas around the Caribbean Gothic, a genre linked to the narrative device of the dead coming back to life, and reference to Jean Rhys’ Gothic postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).