This untitled work by Kathia St. Hilaire (b. 1995, Palm Beach, USA) (formerly entitled Striving) is a polychrome linocut printed on eight sheets of standard paper and mounted on a wooden board. It depicts a tired and desperate mother-son couple and a truncated female figure dressed in a skirt decorated with voodoo motifs, breastfeeding a young girl who is pictured dancing. The image is part of a series of works that the artist started during her last year of high school in 2013, shortly after the catastrophic earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010. The will to survive developed in the aftermath of the disaster is expressed in the titles of the paintings in this series, Striving, Celebration, Le Negre Marron (The Black Maroon) and Women from Jacmel, which also make direct reference to the resilience of the survivors and the history of Haiti. St. Hilaire’s works deal with the cross-over of cultures, issues of female or black identity and subjects connected to Haitian ethnicity, amongst others. In doing so, the artist makes use of the aesthetic and cultural traditions of the Haitian imagination, referring to motifs that range from Haitian products, such as sugar, to the pride invested in the island’s republican past, to religious iconography or that of the voodoo cult. In her works the artist combines graphic arts techniques, painting and collage, using a wide variety of non-traditional materials such as industrial metal, sugar bags or packaging for cosmetics.