This week on Blank Canvas we return to looking at the Ninth National Exhibition “NE9: The Fruit & The Seed,” with two artists, Anina Major and Natascha Vazquez, both of whose works speak to our ties to the land and how important it is to care and cherish the environment.
Major is a transplanted Bahamian, currently living and working in the US, and her works alludes to the experience of transplantation —literally and metaphorically—through her wonderful sculptural piece, which incorporates a live “dilly” (sapodilla) seedling. The piece is a collaborative work with her writer sister, A.L. Major, but also her extended family (her mother’s voice is captured in the sound element and her father sourced the plant material), and speaks to the experience of leaving home, returning and nurturing ourselves and our relationships.
Vazquez is a Bahamian who has returned home, having studied at SCAD, and her piece also speaks to the land and our care for it and for ourselves. On a walk she came across uprooted mangroves—cleared for a development—that had been cast aside to die and she decided she had to memorialise them in beautiful cyanotypes. The artist explains this process and how thinking about “The Fruit and the Seed” led her to experiment more in her own practise.
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