As told to Precious Adesina, a London-based arts and culture journalist. Her work has appeared in a host of publications including The New York Times, BBC Culture, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, Kinfolk, i-D, and more.
Born in Bridgetown and now based between Barbados, London, and Rotterdam, Ada M. Patterson explores her Caribbean heritage alongside a range of pressing global and personal issues. The artist and writer’s probing work has been exhibited worldwide, including in London in Tate Britain’s 2021 survey of Caribbean-British art, Life Between Islands, and will soon feature in her debut solo exhibition in New York, with Copperfield Gallery at Independent.
Patterson’s shapeshifting art practice spans performance, video, textiles, costuming, and more recently painting and drawing on silk. Whatever its form, the work reflects a deep connection to her Barbadian culture. “Barbados is always present,” she says, “whether as the physical site where I create or through the materials I use, or in the folk practices and cultural imagery that resonate within it.”
Ada M. Patterson, The hammeress in a state of disgrace (5), 2024, courtesy of Copperfield, London
From a longstanding exploration of masquerade—a suppressed Barbadian tradition— Patterson has expanded into a new direction focused on the headless figure. These works, initially developed for the Prospect.6 triennial in New Orleans, are now coming to Independent. “Since the mask is usually the center of a costume or character in my art, I had to ask myself: what happens when there’s no mask at all? Eventually, I realized that the answer could be headlessness.”
Unlike many artists, Patterson resists categorising her work by themes, arguing that the subjects she explores are deeply intertwined. “My issue with the European perspective is that they tend to interpret my work through the language of themes,” she says. “The reasons I’m engaged with subjects like the climate crisis are because the Caribbean is a frontline—experiencing intensified hurricanes and relentless climate change. It’s not a theme I choose; it’s a reality we live.”
In this exclusive conversation with Independent Features, Patterson tells us more about discovering masquerade, bearing witness to injustice, and experimenting with image-making. Her statements below have been edited and condensed from an interview with Precious Adesina.
Ada M. Patterson, Looking for 'Looking for Langston', 2019, courtesy of the artist and Copperfield, London
“I started exploring masquerade in my practice after learning about its role in Barbadian history. Despite growing up in Barbados, masquerade wasn’t something I ever saw, which I later discovered was due to it being somewhat eradicated from the culture. In the 1970s and 80s many traditional practices, including masquerade and the burning of effigies, were phased out when the country shifted its economic focus to tourism. In a bid to appeal to a white European and American audience, the country had to make its image more palatable, safer, and sterile.
My earlier works explored a mix of masquerade, performance, video, textiles, and costuming. More recently, I’ve focused on image-making, especially drawing and painting with dye on silk, to explore ideas and questions around rage, disappearance, violence, self-defense, and madness as a response to certain kinds of violence. While I want to keep Barbadian traditions alive through my work, masquerade is also a way to create characters that respond to the identities and expectations imposed on them by the world around them.
I keep changing materials and finding new ways of working in search of the best medium for the message or idea I’m exploring. For a while, I worked a lot with video, which allowed me to bring together different elements. It was useful for documenting work, showcasing multiple aspects at once, and incorporating storytelling through writing and voiceover.
Ada M. Patterson, The Whole World is Turning (still), 2019, courtesy of the artist and Copperfield, London
I made the video piece The Whole World is Turning during a year-long residency in Rotterdam. It was the first time I worked behind the camera, while friends and loved ones performed. I created their masks and I incorporated Kanga textiles, wearable printed cotton fabrics commonly worn in East Africa. Kanga, as part of their design, feature a textual element or proverb. This material became costumes that honored their traditional function as communication devices.
The Whole World is Turning came out of my experience of witnessing Hurricane Dorian devastate the Bahamas in 2019. Firsthand accounts of the disaster were being widely live-streamed online—destruction unfolding in real time. The work wasn’t just about the climate crisis, but about the live-streaming of injustice: fires in Australia, hurricanes elsewhere, political struggles. The issue is not the hurricanes, it’s that the world has been changed so much that surviving no longer feels possible in the same ways. The climate has been changed to such a degree that these seasonal phenomena in the Caribbean are intensifying beyond previously survivable levels. It is fueled by state powers in the Global North not doing their part to curb emissions, effectively condemning our populations to existential threat.
Ada M. Patterson, The Whole World is Turning (still), 2019, courtesy of the artist and Copperfield, London
Being in Europe while Hurricane Dorian was happening was unsettling. People around me seemed oblivious and I kept thinking, How are you at peace with what is happening? That feeling of horror and disconnection shaped the work. I was also reckoning with ideas of queerness, not only in my personal life, but in the wider sense of a disrupted or “queered” political state of the world. I wanted to examine how this crisis, brought on by external powers, was transforming the bodies and ways of life of Caribbean islanders. I didn’t have words for what was going on and Kanga gave me the space to communicate what few words I did have.
My experiences of living in the Netherlands—and Europe more broadly—shape my work less in terms of place, but in terms of the social climate. My recent work reflects the increasing violence faced by trans people, particularly trans women of color. It’s not just about my personal experiences but also about witnessing a growing sense of state violence and political shifts towards fascism. After building a life here, there’s a constant feeling of fear. You watch violence happening elsewhere—against Palestinians, for example—and then see how governments here facilitate and feed that violence. The thought I’m left with is: When will they direct that same attention toward people here? When will they decide that we die? That question simmers beneath my work and thinking right now.
Lately I’ve shifted my focus towards image-making, mainly drawing and painting. I’ve always worked with characters, often beginning with drawings before translating them into performance or video. Now, I want to focus more on those images before they become something else. This shift has given me space to experiment, make unexpected associations, and place elements together in ways that create new meanings. With images, I can depict ideas that might feel impossible to realize through performance or live action. It allows for more playfulness and imagination, free from the constraints of the real world, while staying true to what I’ve long explored in my video work.
For instance, a recurring character in my recent work is a headless woman holding a hammer—something I wouldn’t know how to convincingly pull off in performance. Headlessness is another form of masquerade—it completely supplants the idea of being identifiable.
For me, identity is deeply personal and private—something I prefer to navigate discreetly. Yet I’m often made to be public about it. Masquerade has allowed me to flip that expectation, to refuse the conversation altogether. We’re all doing the work of understanding ourselves, but we should also have the right to do so in private.
Ada M. Patterson, The hammeress in a state of disgrace (4), 2024, courtesy of Copperfield, London
Ada M. Patterson, The hammeress in a state of disgrace (2), 2024, courtesy of Copperfield, London
Ada M. Patterson, The hammeress in a state of disgrace (1), 2024, courtesy of Copperfield, London
Ada M. Patterson, The hammeress in a state of disgrace, 2024. Installation view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home (Nov 2, 2024–Feb 2, 2025). Commissioned by Prospect.6. Image courtesy of the artist and Prospect New Orleans. Photo by Alex Marks.
Ada M. Patterson, The hammeress in a state of disgrace, 2024. Installation view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home (Nov 2, 2024–Feb 2, 2025). Commissioned by Prospect.6. Image courtesy of the artist and Prospect New Orleans. Photo by Alex Marks.
I’m not from the United States, but right now, the social climate feels terrifying. It already was, but under the new administration, people like me were thrown under the bus almost immediately. It’s only been a couple of months, and trans people are deathly afraid. Not just of what’s happening now, but of what has been happening for years—and how much faster it’s accelerating.
What’s even more unsettling is how many people seem at peace with it. Not trans people, but others—accepting this as just the way things are. I don’t know if my work can stand against that kind of force, but I do know that my community resonates with the questions I’m asking. My work comes from my experience, but it’s also about something larger—about women navigating this world, through a trans lens and beyond. It’s about the hypercontrol of women’s bodies, the rising wave of far-right governance, and how our minds and voices aren’t simply lost but taken from us—dismissed, made illegitimate.
I believe in breaking points and things are only getting worse. I want to ask people: When will you reach yours? And when you do, what will you do about it? More importantly, what will we do about it together?”
As told to Precious Adesina, a London-based arts and culture journalist. Her work has appeared in a host of publications including The New York Times, BBC Culture, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, Kinfolk, i-D, and more.