About

Originating from the imagined empire of MaKroMa, a sacred world built on ritual, ancestral knowledge, and collective remembrance, Lady Blake arrives in Jamaica after the collapse of her homeland, displaced across time and space.

In the city, she becomes both witness and archivist, searching for the sacred memories threatened by disappearance beneath the pressures of development, prosperity, and urban expansion.

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As Kingston rises upward through concrete towers, gated spaces, and accelerated ideas of progress, Lady Blake moves through the city gathering fragments of embodied memory carried in ritual, drum rhythms, the call of the abeng, rum, storytelling, and masquerade traditions.

Through these sacred objects and performances, she attempts to preserve what the modern city risks forgetting: ancestral truths, spiritual connection, communal histories, and ways of being rooted in collective care.

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Photo credit: Ryan Morrison, 2026

Inspired by Jamaican Jonkonnu traditions, West African storytelling, and the mystical intelligence of Anansi, this piece was created by Jo-Hanna Taylor as part of Walking Tall Jamaica's Carnival in Jamaica 2025 presentation.

The piece explores the “essence of the web”: connection, femininity, ancestry, and resilience.

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The costume combines black spider-like limbs, flowing fabrics, red and orange gems symbolizing fire and transformation, and stitched Kente cloth honouring Anansi’s Ashanti roots and the African lineage woven into Caribbean identity. Elevated on stilts, the character becomes both watcher and storyteller.

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At its heart, Anansi’s Granddaughter is also a gentle declaration that women can exist as feminine, regal, and powerful within traditionally male-dominated spaces , occupying space while carrying folklore forward into modern Caribbean expression

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Photo credit: Jik Reuben, 2025

Inspired by the Kingston skyline and Jamaica’s multi-faceted relationship with the sea.

Johanna imagines the city as something magical: a place where sunlight pushes through concrete, where stories rise like heat from the harbour, and where the water quietly witnesses it all.

The sea is not just a landscape but an archive - carring ships, migration, trade, resistance, survival, music, memory, and knowledge from distant shores into the making of Jamaica itself.

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​The cloud-like mask nestled within the skyline reflects the unseen spirit of the city: the memories, ancestors, and cultural echoes that hover above the streets. Shades of blue throughout the costume honour Kingston Harbour and the Caribbean Sea, while the shimmering wings mimic jeweled waves rolling against the shoreline.

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Photo credit: Gavin Gattie, 2026

In The City Remembers, Simone Harris reimagines the historical Belisario lithograph, the Jamaican Jonkonnu character House Head, within the rapidly shifting landscape of contemporary Kingston. Replacing the plantation great house is the modern apartment tower, angular, vertical, concrete, and increasingly dominant within the city skyline. Balanced precariously above the stilt walker’s body, the tower becomes a contemporary monument to power, wealth, and exclusion.

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This reinterpretation emerges from Harris’ own experience of migration and urban transformation. Born and raised in Spanish Town after her parents migrated from the Maroon communities of Portland in search of a “betta life,” she reflects on Kingston as part of an ongoing colonial project, a city continually reshaped through movement, aspiration, labor, and dispossession.

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Where the plantation great house once overlooked the land, today gated apartment towers overlook the city. They rise across Kingston as symbols of modern status and economic aspiration, while simultaneously redefining access, belonging, and memory.​

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Photo credit: Gavin Gattie, 2026

Inspiried by the traditional Jamaican Jonkonnu Devil and the representation of the struggle between good and evil within Caribbean masquerade traditions. Khalil reimagines the Devil not simply as a figure of fear, but as living cultural memory refusing disappearance.

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Draped entirely in red and positioned against the colonial architecture of downtown Kingston, the figure appears both theatrical and confrontational, carrying traces of older spiritual and folkloric performances into the modern city.

Although the traditional Jonkonnu Devil is slowly disappearing from public cultural life, its symbolic presence continues to resonate within contemporary Jamaica.

The Devil embodies the tension between visibility and erasure, reminding viewers that while traditions may fade, the conflicts they once represented, between good and evil, justice and corruption, spirit and survival, continue to shape everyday life.​​​

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Photo credit: Gavin Gattie, 2026

A contemporary Moko Jumbie character inspired by the figure of the Jamaican town crier, the woman who moved through communities carrying news, warnings, memory, and oral history from one generation to the next.

Positioned between folklore and contemporary reality, the character reflects on the disappearance of communal forms of communication in an age shaped by digital media, surveillance, and social fragmentation.

The character stands as both prophecy and archive, a figure refusing silence in the face of forgetting.

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Photo credit: Gavin Gattie, 2026

A duet off stilts, Law & Disorder features the Police Officer and the Security Guard, reimagined as contemporary Jamaican Jonkonnu characters reflecting the visibility, contradictions, and complexity of authority within everyday life.

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Positioned within the language of Jonkonnu masquerade, the Police Officer becomes both spectacle and social commentary, exposing how (state) power is performed, embodied, and negotiated within contemporary Jamaican society. Alongside this figure, the Security Guard transforms one of the most recognizable presences in urban Jamaica into a masquerade character shaped by labor, surveillance, class, and the privatization of safety and belonging.

Seen outside banks, plazas, apartment complexes, supermarkets, and gated communities, the security guard occupies a complex position, simultaneously visible and invisible, empowered and vulnerable, often tasked with protecting spaces tied to wealth and exclusion.

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Through performance, mimicry, and embodiment, Law & Disorder examines how fear, inequality, and surveillance continue to shape the modern city while extending Jonkonnu’s long tradition of using satire and masquerade to critique systems of power.

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Photo credit: Gavin Gattie, 2026

Draped in layers of greenery, the figure appears partially absorbed into the natural environment, suspended between human and spirit.

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Performed on short stilts, the character moves closer to the ground, creating the illusion of a body emerging directly from the earth itself. Positioned against Kingston’s expanding concrete architecture, the figure reflects on the fragile relationship between urban development and ecological memory.

Blending camouflage, masquerade, and environmental symbolism, Morass reimagines the Moko Jumbie as a living extension of the landscape, a quiet reminder of the natural worlds that continue to survive, adapt, and disappear within the modern city.

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Photo credit: Gavin Gattie, 2026

Cloaked entirely in white and concealed behind a blank mask, the figure moves through Kingston as both spirit and witness, a haunting presence within a rapidly transforming cityscape.

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The figure appears neither fully human nor fully ghost, but something liminal, an embodiment of memory moving quietly through the city.

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Positioned against Kingston’s expanding concrete architecture, White Watcher reflects on forgetting:

• the disappearance of communal memory,

• spiritual connection,

• ecological awareness,

• and ancestral truths beneath the pressures of modernization and urban development

White Watcher asks; what happens when cities grow upward while becoming increasingly disconnected from the histories, spirits, and cultural inheritances beneath them?

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Photo credit: Gavin Gattie, 2026

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Inspired by the Jamaican folkloric figure of the Rolling Calf, a supernatural spirit often described as a chained beast haunting roads and crossroads at night, this contemporary interpretation reimagines the character within the modern city.

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Traditionally associated with fear, punishment, and spiritual warning, the Rolling Calf has long occupied a powerful place within Jamaican oral storytelling and folk memory. In this contemporary form, the Rolling Calf emerges during Halloween events as both a haunting presence and cultural archive.

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This interpretation blends folklore with theatrical spectacle suspended between horror and performance art, the Rolling Calf reflects on how folklore continues to evolve while remaining deeply embedded within Jamaican cultural imagination.

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Photo credit: Shadane Wright, 2024

Created by Trinidadian artist Victoria Bisnath, this Jamaica-inspired winged costume was gifted to Walking Tall as part of the inaugural Walking Tall Kaisokah Moko Jumbie Residency in San Fernando, Trinidad in 2024. ​

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Constructed in the colors of the Jamaican flag, the costume’s expansive wings combine layered textiles, including fabric printed with the face of Bob Marley and sewn Jamaican flags embedded throughout the design. When activated through movement, the wings transform the performer into a living symbol of flight, freedom, and national identity.

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Dynamic and adaptable, the costume has been shared among multiple members of Walking Tall Jamaica, allowing different bodies and performance styles to inhabit and reinterpret the piece.

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Photo credit: Jik Reuben, 2025

The Hummingbird People is a collaborative Moko Jumbie performance and costume work by Simone Harris and Pixel Heller that explores collective memory, queer identity, migration, and diasporic connection through Caribbean masquerade and stilt walking traditions.

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Moving through the streets of Kingston, the Moko Jumbies transform the city into a site of ritual, visibility, and remembrance. Their vibrant feather-like costumes echo the hummingbird, a symbol of movement, resilience, transformation, and survival throughout the Caribbean while reflecting the fluid movement of people, culture, and memory across generations and geographies.

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Photo credit: Gavin Gattie, 2025

Crowned with a sculptural headpiece resembling stacked speaker boxes and sound system equipment, this is a moving monument to Jamaican music culture designed and worn by Kathrine Johnson.

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Positioned within the everyday movement of the city, the piece reflects on sound as memory, how music carries stories, survival, protest, and joy across communities.

Blending masquerade, performance, and contemporary symbolism, Kathrine is reimagining the Moko Jumbie as both cultural guardian and living archive of Kingston’s sonic landscape.

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Photo credit: Gavin Gattie, 2026

Created for performances at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival 2026, these two Moko Jumbie costumes celebrate Jamaican cultural identity, movement, and diasporic presence through color, performance, and masquerade.

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The costume on the left, Jamaica, draws directly from the Jamaican national flag, transforming its black, green, and gold into layered moving forms that evoke the vibrancy of Caribbean carnival traditions. The figure becomes a living embodiment of national pride and celebration.

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The towering figure on the right, Reggae Jamaica, expands this visual language through red, green, gold, and black; colors deeply connected to reggae music, Rastafari symbolism, resistance, and Pan-African identity.

Together, they are a walking tribute to Jamaica’s global cultural influence and the enduring spirit of reggae as both music and message.