The old world feeling of the Song of Songs owes much to the mixed racial ancestry of Anna Ruth Henriques.  With familial roots in medieval Spain, Africa and Asia, Henriques reflects the mélange of cultural influences that make up Jamaican society. Her work speaks to these various ancestral influences and evokes the ornate yet primitive tempera paintings of the medieval Mediterranean. With Song of Songs, Henriques links her various cultural identities in pictograph form. The formal arrangement of these works also prompts imagery of African designed cloths with their emphasis on grids, and even African American quilting traditions.  The series of eight Song of Songs (based on the eight verses of love in the Old Testament) works like woven tapestries interweaving both personal and national iconography to tell a familiar story of migration, Diaspora and ‘rootedness’. Henriques has exhibited in numerous shows in Jamaica and internationally. Recently she participated in the major contemporary art show, New World Imagery: Contemporary Jamaican Art, at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

“The speaking silence of the past beckons.
It wants its stories to be told.
Sometimes it whispers in soft yet salient verse,
Sometimes it cries out in deep, dense heartfelt fervor
I hear and I answer for it speaks from within.”