Robin Clare – Jamaican Contemporary Artist

DANCING WORDS

Dancing Words is a series of paintings that transform Jamaican dancehall into visual rhythm. Each work layers sequences of line-drawn figures with text naming the moves, creating patterned compositions that oscillate between notation and image. The repeated gestures insist on visibility, while the unfamiliar language of the step names opens an ambiguous entry point: for Jamaicans they spark recognition, humour or memory, but for outsiders they often read as exotic slang, a surface “Caribbean cool” detached from the culture that produced it.

The series treats dancehall not as spectacle but as embodied knowledge. Each move carries weight as an expression of joy and survival shaped by the histories of slavery, colourism and inequality. To name a move is to root it in a specific Jamaican context, yet the repetition of forms and absence of origin unsettle that claim, mirroring how dancehall travels, mutates, and is often stripped of its creators in global circulation.

Using saturated colour, crisp line and rhythmic composition, I draw from the pulse of dancehall posters, street signage and textile patterns to create paintings that vibrate with visual syncopation. The works are both celebration and critique: they assert dancehall’s inventiveness while pointing to the structural forces that render its contributions disposable in the eyes of institutions.

In Dancing Words, dance becomes a visual language of memory, resistance and declaration, a body-based form that refuses disappearance.

Read my extended essay on the series here - https://medium.com/@robinclareart/dancing-words-movement-as-memory-and-resistance-ad4aae4992e6

Stop Watch Di Pumz, Acrylic & Ink on Cotton Rag, 53cm x 73cm

Badda Wave, Acrylic & Ink on Cotton Rag, 50cm x 40cm

Bogle Move, Acrylic & Ink on Cotton Rag, 50cm x 40cm

Pop Yuh Collar, Acrylic & Ink on Cotton Rag, 50cm x 40cm

Fabulous, Acrylic & Ink on Cotton Rag, 50cm x 40cm