04 ISSUE VI
JUNE 2025
JUNE 2025
What Happens to Our Beaches?
Confronting the colonial legacy of tourism and climate change in the Caribbean as an artist from the diaspora.
By Danielle Sargeant
I am an interdisciplinary landscape artist whose work explores depictions of both interior and exterior realms, grappling with issues impacting the environments I represent, such as climate change. Many of my paintings have depicted scenes of coastal erosion, environmental decay, and pollution in the UK, where I grew up. Nevertheless, I had not yet considered race or human bodies in relation to these crises until writing the proposal for my MFA Fine Arts thesis.
As a Black woman, I began to think about my own history and heritage in relation to my studies: I was born in Jamaica to a Jamaican mother and a Nevisian father. I moved to England aged 5, and my parents would tell me stories and share updates from my extended family. We visited family periodically, but before 2024, I had not returned to the Caribbean in eight years.
In May 2024, I was awarded the Mellon Initiative and Tishman Environment & Design Center Creative Fellowship for 2024-2025. It called for capstone projects on the intersection of climate change and race, which prompted me to pinpoint connections, concerns, and curiosities within my own life and practice.
From July to August last year, as part of my fellowship, I came to see the region through the lens of an artist from the diaspora. I experienced the complex history and current environmental challenges firsthand, particularly those exemplified by what was happening to the beaches.
The Eastern Caribbean, composed of small islands, is one of the most vulnerable regions in the face of climate change, despite being one of the lowest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Rising sea levels, harsher hurricanes, and soaring temperatures, for example, not only endanger habitats and infrastructure but pose a direct threat to the tourism-dependent economy.
Tourism in this region is a consequence of colonization. The long-term extraction of goods, such as sugar and tobacco, through colonialist exploitation and slavery laid the foundation for a system that depleted Caribbean resources. Whilst industrialized nations with the highest emissions gained their prosperity at the expense of poorer, minority countries, places like the Caribbean have been unable to compete with the current world economy and heavily rely on enticing consistent tourism.
Nevis Bath Hotel, built by slaves in 1778, is lauded as the first hotel in the Caribbean. It marked the beginning of the luxury hotel and tourism industry, utilizing the natural Hot Springs as an attraction. I visited the site and marveled as the old bath house stood feet away from the current pools of geothermal water still being utilized by locals and tourists alike.
The legacy of tourism continues to be felt across the islands, but it is the idyllic beaches that are now most synonymous with them. As the beaches deteriorate and erode, these colonized nations are forced to pay the price again.
In Barbados, I spoke to a hotel employee who was busy shoveling mounds of Sargassum from the shore. It is an unsightly algae that becomes foul-smelling if not removed quickly and has vastly increased in bloom due to climate change. I was told that it has directly impacted the number of tourists visiting the facility, as the beaches they were once drawn to are obscured.
Similarly, in St Kitts, I encountered the most breathtaking and simultaneously heart-wrenching scene while up on the Timothy Hill Overlook. A dramatic shadow of Sargassum engulfed the coastline, turning the water deep shades of orange and brown while forcing what sand was left into a narrow ring.
Witnessing these realities firsthand is a confrontation with what has already been lost. The image of the Caribbean’s clear blue waters and soft, fine sand is already torn, but what this points to next, on a global scale, is yet to be displayed.
As an artist from the diaspora, this loss now resonates through my practice and has significantly altered my visual language. I see my thesis installation, titled 'Does Water Carry Memory?', as the beginning of an encounter with this loss as I continue to examine the convergence of humanity and climate change.
What happens to our beaches is what happens to ourselves; it is not a problem to avoid, it is already here.
Danielle Sargeant is a British interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator of Caribbean heritage.