Siren of the Tropics (2026)
Burrell’s multimedia installation combines sound, projection mapping, sculpture, and handmade instruments to evoke a tropical atmosphere. Her work grapples with ecological grief and speculative fiction, inverting the colonial garden as a space of dominion and control. Burrell instead explores dark ecologies and psychogeographies—foregrounding the generative potential of toxicity, decay, mutation, undergrowth, and emotional remediation. Like a choir, where each voice adds to a collective score, the installation's objects respond to one another in an interdependent, contingent sphere. Inspired by jazz improvisation, swamp ecology, and Josephine Baker’s subversion of the colonial gaze in films such as Siren of the Tropics (1927), Caribbean Afro-Surrealism, her installation considers the body’s relationship to vibrations, feedback systems, and scale, translating the terrain of ecological interdependence into a resonant sensory mirage.
