Some art asks to be looked at. Salomie Lawrence’s work asks to be felt; across time, across water, and across the silence between generations.

Based in Grenada, her low relief mixed media paintings move through questions of ancestry, inherited memory, and the forces that shape human identity long before we are conscious of them. Built from texture mediums, acrylic, ink and pigment, her surfaces are quiet and deliberate monotone palettes broken only by metallic light, rewarding those who are patient enough to stay.

Raised in the layered, diverse landscape of 1970s and 1980s South East London, Lawrence arrived in Grenada first in 2003, returning repeatedly, until, in 2017, she stopped leaving. The island did not simply become home; it became her place of connection and belonging.

For over a decade she worked as a mosaic artist, practicing the ancient discipline of assembling fragments into coherent form. That work found lasting recognition in a permanent installation at The Maurice Bishop International Airport. The question that drove it has never left her: how do broken pieces become whole.

During the 2020 pandemic, following the passing of a beloved family member and cut off from mosaic supplies, Lawrence turned to pigment, ink and texture and in doing so found a deeper excavation. The Ancestor series was born from grief, from stillness, and from something profoundly personal. Having never known her father’s heritage, Lawrence had long carried a particular kind of untetheredness. The ancestors she began to create were not only abstract. They were, quietly, her own.

The Ancestor series engages two inseparable and layered legacies. Lawrence’s own, and Grenada’s. Born of mixed heritage and raised far from her father’s origins, she has long understood what it means to carry an incomplete history. That personal disconnection becomes the lens through which she enters Grenada’s deeper story, its history of enslavement, survival, and resilience. Lawrence approaches that history as a witness, alive to what the water and earth of these lands carry: the traumas, the gifts, the rhythms that form culture and self across generations, long before we are conscious of them. These are not abstract inquiries. She knows what it is to search for where you belong.

The work of Salomie Lawrence is held in private collections locally and internationally, and is on permanent exhibition at The Maurice Bishop International Airport. Over the past 8 years Lawrence has exhibited consistently across Grenada, showing alongside the island’s leading artists in curated group exhibitions, Arts Council showcases, and cultural events including Grenada’s National 50th Independence Exhibition, a landmark cultural moment marking half a century of sovereignty. In 2019 she received the Emerging Artists Award from the Grenada Arts Council, and in 2020 she represented Grenada at the World Expo in Dubai. Her work has since been selected as diplomatic gifts and cultural presentations on behalf of Grenada, placing her practice at the intersection of art, identity, and national pride. Salomie Lawrence is a distinctive and quietly urgent voice in contemporary Caribbean art.