Tavares Strachan was 10 when the Encyclopedia Britannica arrived at his home. Growing up in Nassau, in the Bahamas, he was both impressed and confused. Was everything in the known world to be found in its pages? How could you claim to know everything anyway? Who decides, and what might they be missing out? Thirty years later the artist came up with an answer when he created the Encyclopedia of Invisibility.
The book, bound in navy-blue leather with gilt edging, was completed in 2018. From a distance you might mistake it for a hefty Britannica itself, but instead its more than 15,000 entries cover all that other knowledge: the stuff that official western histories have ignored, brushed over or otherwise excluded.
Overlaid with sketches, scribbles, texts and diagrams, the Encyclopedia of Invisibility – subtitled Hidden Histories A-Z – plays with, and debunks the idea of, centralised, authoritative knowledge. This is not to suggest it’s a post-truth project, rather that, until recently, our stories have been more narrowly told.
Inside you will find creatures both mythical and real, comic-book characters, anecdotes and a host of figures who deserve to be remembered. There is Henry Box Brown, a 19th-century Virginia slave who, according to the encyclopedia, “escaped to freedom at the age of 33 by arranging to have himself mailed in a wooden crate in 1849 to abolitionists in Philadelphia”.
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Matthew Henson, the black explorer who journeyed with Robert Peary to the North Pole in 1909, but was written out of history for almost a half a century, also features, as does Mary J Bonnin, the first woman master diver in the US navy. And what about Robert Henry Lawrence jnr? He was the first African-American astronaut, and would possibly have made it to the moon, had he not died in a supersonic-jet crash in 1967.
“Can these lost stories hold the key that unlocks our sense of belonging?” the artist asked in a Ted talk in 2023. “Lost stories definitely need to be told,” he continued. “Not in small ways. But in ways that match the ambitions of the people that we speak for.”
The Encyclopedia of Invisibility was to have been on show at Dublin’s Science Gallery in 2020, as part of the exhibition Invisible. Like so many other things at the time, Invisible ended up as an online event, thanks to the pandemic. Visitors to Trinity College Dublin’s East Campus, at Grand Canal Quay, now have the opportunity to get eyeball to eyeball with more of Strachan’s work, as two huge sculptural heads have been installed, and will be in situ until June.
Made to a scale that clearly measures up to the ambitions of the abolitionist and activist Harriet Tubman, and the Jamaican political leader and black nationalist Marcus Garvey, the heads are from Strachan’s ongoing Ruin of a Giant series.
As the artist describes it, the economies of bronze fabrication and large-scale stone carving historically meant that public sculptural honours were reserved for those in positions of power. This has led to the histories of injustice often hiding in plain sight.
Ireland has a better record than many countries, but walk the streets, or explore the university courtyards, of many of the western world’s great cities and be gazed down upon by the stony eyes of slavers, conquerors and colonists.
The names of many have gone into daily usage, on streets, buildings, galleries, libraries and concert halls, and current debates ask whether replacing or changing them is a positive step or an attempt to erase history. Strachan’s project is in a different vein, adding rather than removing. “Can our understanding of history that is carved in stone or cast in bronze be amended?” he asks.
Incorporating lines of poetry into the veins of stone, Strachan has created the heads to have an appearance of decay, as if they have perhaps emerged from some archaeological dig; older gods, coming back to Earth with new information to share.
“I think,” Strachan says, “when we’re babies the environment around us is trying to convince us that we’re not enough.” A life’s journey, he continues, can be spent trying to find out who we are and why we’re here, while also connecting to a rediscovery of childhood wonder and a sense of play.
That question of who we are is shaped by the stories told around us and about us throughout our lives, and it is loaded by the weights of marginalisation, discrimination, migration and displacement.
“My name is Scottish,” Strachan says. “A lot of us Caribbeans with these names are deeply fascinated by the etymologies. Because at some point someone from Scotland had some relationship with someone that is related to me. And what else am I going to say other than I got it through slavery?”
He pauses to weigh up the meaning of this. Such a relationship is very unlikely to have been consensual. “There is no deep emotional chasm I feel as a result of saying it. In fact, saying it leads to a domino effect of all the other bits and pieces that can help define my conditions, the conditions of my people.”
The artist’s own journey has been defined by a refusal to accept limitations. From stargazing while working on a fishing boat as a teenager, to cosmonaut training in Russia, to a series of trips to the North Pole (he is the first Bahamian to have gone there), he has followed his instincts, and had the courage to persist. “You ask 16 times, and the 17th time you get it,” he has said.
Stargazing appealed to his egalitarian instincts: “No matter where you are, how much or how little you have, you can look up in the skies and study the stars.” Oscar Wilde would have approved.
In 2024 the Guardian described Strachan as “the great artist of lost figures and unmoored stories”, but perhaps that is to misunderstand the narrow basis of the anchors represented by official histories.
These may have been concentrated for centuries by western colonial narratives, but it is they that are becoming increasingly unmoored in the face of the more obvious tarnishing of once untouchable reputations. Strachan is emblematic of the inexorable and timely rise of other voices, insisting on being both heard and respected.
Strachan, who has a melodic voice, a deft turn of phrase and an astonishingly eclectic range of influences, has created an equally eclectic series of works. There are huge, upended sculptures, glowing neon installations, smaller sculptures set in what appear to be fields.
He put a sculpture into orbit, and set up Basec – Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center – in Nassau in 2008, after returning from cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin centre in Russia, to bring the possibilities of science, technology and experimentation to young people in his home community. A line of clothing, made with his mother, supports the project.
In 2022 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant of $800,000, to further his work.
Inevitably, perhaps, Strachan sees postcolonial parallels between his own culture and that of Ireland, and finds particular strands of connection in music.
“Ideas,” he says, “are in the ether. They find you, or you find them. The reason why artists continue to exist is because we’re tasked with the role of providing new traditions, constantly finding new ways of contending with the current situations that we are in.
“Artworks are reminders of some of the things we’re talking about: our relationship to time, to nature, to the ecosystem. When I look at it from that perspective, I think that there’s a reason why the universe continues to birth artists. Otherwise it would have stopped.”
Strachan’s work is in Dublin thanks to the Form Foundation, a project by Danielle Ryan and Richard Bourke, which will bring large-scale public sculpture to the Trinity College site for extended periods over the next 10 years.
Ryan, an actor and entrepreneur, is possibly best known as a granddaughter of Tony Ryan, the Ryanair founder, but one of her most enduring legacies to date is her founding of the Lir, the national academy of dramatic art, whose famous alumni include Paul Mescal and Alison Oliver.
Having experienced the power of public art while living in the United States, she and Bourke, her husband, have established a foundation whose ambitious programme may well come to match the Lir in significance.
Following Strachan in June will be an installation on the same site by the Tipperary-born artist John Gerrard, with his first major outdoor work in Dublin. Gerrard’s real-time 3D video works have been hugely compelling at Galway International Arts Festival, and the artist came to global attention when his Flag backdropped U2’s concerts at the Las Vegas Sphere in 2023.
Gerrard’s Ghost Feed, in which a white-cheeked spider monkey sits engrossed in a smartphone as the world around it burns, will be in Dublin for a year.
“Public art’s great blessing,” he says, “is that it gets the most incredibly diverse audiences: from revellers at night to workers on their way home. The smartphone is one of the most powerful tools we have now. Ghost Feed will be animating the Silicon Docks, facing them in an apocalyptic setting.”
All that is to come, but for now Harriet Tubman and Marcus Garvey are gazing out across Dublin. How much does this matter? Can public art change how we think and feel about our histories, ourselves and our shared futures?
The answer is very probably yes: injustice thrives when it is half-hidden, normalised by the banality of being a feature in our day-to-day lives. Maybe statues of colonists and slavers do become invisible through the passage of time, their crimes settling into seeming like just one more thing that happened in the past. Why, their presence implies, don’t we simply get on with things in the here and now?
But imagine, for a moment, if the profound legacies of the likes of Tubman, once a conductor on the life-saving Underground Railroad, which spirited slaves to freedom, became better known. Imagine if the history of human endeavour became more well rounded, more inclusive, more permeable to different experiences. Wouldn’t we all be the richer for it?
Ruin of Giants is at Trinity College Dublin until June 1st. There is no admission charge, and the sculptures are accessible from Grand Canal Quay, opposite Waterways Ireland, around the corner from the Lir Academy.
