Jasmine Thomas-Girvan (b. 1961) is a Jamaican-born sculptor and installation artist whose practice has evolved over decades to encompass large-scale, multimedia explorations of history, identity, and transformation. Trained in jewellery and textile design, Thomas-Girvan earned her BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York, where she received the Tiffany Honor Award for Excellence. Her early work, often intimate and wearable, gradually expanded into immersive sculptural and installation-based forms, demonstrating a sustained engagement with materiality, narrative, and cultural memory. Drawing on Caribbean history, myth, ritual, literature, and personal experience, her practice negotiates the interplay between the particularities of place and the universal human condition.

Thomas-Girvan’s sculptures and installations are distinguished by the seamless integration of traditional and indigenous materials with found and natural objects. Palm fronds, calabashes, feathers, shells, and other elements sourced from her environment operate as both material and mnemonic devices, functioning as repositories for ancestral knowledge and historical memory. Through these materials, she interrogates the legacies of colonialism while simultaneously activating alternative ways of knowing, situating her practice within a framework she describes as “inverse archaeology.” The magical realist qualities evident in her work recall African cosmologies and postcolonial Caribbean politics, creating assemblages that are at once familiar and fantastical, offering viewers an entry into histories often unrecorded or obscured.

Central to Thomas-Girvan’s process is a critical engagement with Eurocentric methods of metalwork and sculpture. Trained in classical metalsmithing, she recognizes its limitations in addressing marginalized voices and thus seeks modes of production that resonate materially and spiritually with Caribbean realities. Her turn toward indigenous materials reflects a commitment to grounding artistic practice in local ecology, while simultaneously fostering a reconnection to ancestral knowledge systems. Each work embodies a dialogue between ecological, cultural, and historical registers, offering a multisensory experience that encourages reflection and engagement.

Thomas-Girvan regards her work as both a vessel and a catalyst—objects that do not merely exist as sculptures, but as triggers for contemplation, transformation, and healing. By reimagining unremembered legacies and centering alternative epistemologies, she prompts viewers to reconsider the accepted narratives of the Caribbean and the broader postcolonial world. Her art becomes a site for both personal and collective inquiry, inviting audiences to engage with stories of resilience, identity, and the ongoing project of cultural reclamation.

Over the course of her career, Thomas-Girvan has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Foundation Arts Award (1996), the National Gallery of Jamaica Aaron Matalon Award (2012, 2017), and the Silver Musgrave Medal (2014). Her work has been exhibited widely across the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe, with public commissions that attest to her continued exploration of transformation, identity, and the intersection of material, myth, and memory.