Winsom

The Project

Winsom Winsom is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, textiles, film, and installation. Her work is rooted in Afro-centric values and Ancient African spiritual traditions. It is not decorative. It is devotional, political, and deeply personal, often in the same breath.

The Agnes Etherington Art Centre commissioned this film as part of their Artists at Agnes series. Agnes holds over 17,000 works across their collections. Most of them are never on a gallery wall. A film like this is how an institution keeps an artist and their work alive in the culture, even when the walls can't hold everything.

That's the practical reason Agnes makes these films.

The deeper reason is this: Winsom lived for a long time in Kingston, where the Agnes is based on the Queen’s University campus. She is an artist who has shaped a generation of creators through her mentorship and her uncompromising commitment to work that comes from somewhere real. There is no wall label that can carry that weight. You have to see her, hear her, watch her move through her practice. That's what film can do that nothing else can.

Our Approach

Winsom doesn't explain her work. She doesn't translate its spiritual dimension into secular language for an unfamiliar audience. Her whole philosophy is about direct encounter over mediated experience. A documentary that tried to decode her practice on her behalf would have been a betrayal of the subject and a waste of the form.

So we didn't do that. We spent days with her, building trust, listening, laughing, and a lot of eating. We let the work do what it was built to do.

Then we spent time with mentees d’bi.young anitafrika and Pamila Matharu. Their perspectives allowed us to deeply understand the impact an artist like Winsom Winsom has on the world.

That's exactly the film an artist like Winsom deserves.

Winsom

Winsom

Winsom

Why It Matters

Institutions like Agnes are doing something the broader culture isn't always willing to do: they're maintaining a record of artists whose work exists in important collections but who lack the commercial machinery to stay visible. The film series is part of an explicit institutional strategy to close that gap through documentary. Every film Agnes commissions celebrates important artists, and shows that this person's practice is real, it matters, it has shaped people, and it deserves sustained attention.

It was a privilege for us to spend time with Winsom Winsom, to craft this film, and for it to be a part of a wonderful series created by the Agnes.