Article
01/30/23

In This House Is a Home: Reconsidering Home in The Bahamian Context

written by Natalie Willis Whylly

Living on the frontlines of the climate crisis in the Caribbean, we, Bahamians, have seen first hand the devastation and destruction of life and land, and within this trauma we have had to consider what the concept of “home” will mean for us moving forward. In the simplest sense, home can be considered a specific dwelling with specific memories and tangible echoes of one’s life. But what happens when that specificity of place is gone? When the walls are gone along with the photos on them that represent the course of one's life? The familiar smells archived in the surface of the walls of a kitchen, living room, or bedroom?  

What happens when we must move further from the land we know because it is inundated, submerged by rising seas? Heino Schmid’s “In this house is a home…”, curated by Jodi Minnis (Exhibitions and Programming Director of TERN Gallery), breaks down figurative walls with the intentions of rebuilding on one’s own terms: a strategy and source of hope for the future? Who can say? But it is a necessary and pertinent investigation in our current moment of climate uncertainty - and it is indeed an investigation, fitting with Schmid’s general practice in curiosity. Perhaps misconstrued as something of a “mad scientist” in his studio practice, the burgeoning body of work in “In this house is a home…” is, to my mind, more akin to childlike exploration and inquiry: breaking down, building back up, exploring inner workings. Breezeblocks become building blocks; madeira pods, a child’s rattle; and beams no longer support structures but become symbols of the structures of a family. 

In Context 

Looking at Schmid’s paring back and minimization of the Bahamian home, it is important to note the art historical context in which these images exist. Prompted by the curator of the exhibition, Jodi Minnis, Schmid and Minnis both give us space to complicate our view of what home can mean in our context. Looking at the relatively young canon of Bahamian art, the treatment of architecture during the colonial era, was often used to reinforce class strata. During this time with the purpose of promoting colonial propaganda of the Caribbean “picturesque” (as detailed by Dr Krista Thompson in her seminal text, An Eye For the Tropics). Those images show a stark contrast in the islands between large hotels or stately homes intended for foreigners and visitors, in juxtaposition with the more modest dwellings for Bahamians of African descent. The intent was to inspire a notion of “quaintness” that fit the “smiling native” trope used to subjugate Black Bahamians in the colony. 

In the run-up to independence, and during the period of Bahamian Modernism (as coined by the nation’s foremost art historian, Dr Erica M James), these images begin to become more problematized–and recontextualized, and inscribed–by the Bahamian populace at large. It is fitting, then, to see Minnis’ careful curation of the work in a tourist space - as TERN sits on the property of The Island House, a boutique hotel. Neither the artist nor curator shies away from engaging in these rich, sometimes uncomfortable, though entirely necessary conversations on Caribbean art. This is particularly commendable work when considering its context: sitting in a nation that is a major tourist center, with a dark and difficult history of said tourism being rooted in colonial subjugation and oppression with its legacies palpably felt in the present. 

It is perhaps difficult to deal with the subject of the Bahamian landscape without being subjected to or feeding into its complex historical intertext - even in the rejection of these colonial tropes. While there may always be any number of artists continuing on in the tradition of picturesque imagery and colonial tourist propaganda that the nation still relies on, it was initially met with resistance and questioning thanks to the congregation of creatives at the Chelsea Pottery in Nassau, the capital of The Bahamas. It is worth noting that this is largely thanks to one of the “Fathers of Bahamian Art”, Maxwell Taylor. Taylor, a Nassuvian born in Grants Town (part of the “nation’s navel”), was perhaps the first documented Black Bahamian to depict Black Bahamians outside of the photographic, tourist gaze. That is to say, Taylor gave honest and unabashed representation of Bahamians in our everyday lives - lives filled with postcolonial struggle and inequalities. Taylor did not cater to the pacification and comfort of visitors encountering Bahamian poverty, struggle, and strength. He produced images that audaciously show our reality, whilst also offering dignity and deference to the everyday heroes within them. The structures in Taylor’s work are rendered honestly and from a place of knowing and recognition. He does not show us the quaint “huts” of days gone by, he shows homes in disarray and disrepair with families struggling to make ends meet - often miraculously managing to do so, thanks to the deified mothers he references in his work. 

The structures show reality, not the projected images of the space. Following in this lineage of anti-colonial treatment of the local home, the work of Tamika Galanis (Bahamian documentary and multimedia visual artist) takes it one step further. Galanis is responsible for the naming and defining of the concept of “the Bahamian interior”, noting it as the site of our indigenous culture in its most honest sense - that is, decidedly not for tourist consumption. Whereas, Schmid’s treatment of the Bahamian home does something else entirely, perhaps something entirely unto itself - it breaks down most typical markers of our homes in a way that seems to wish to rebuild anew rather than offer decolonial context of our lived experience in the islands.  

On rebuilding home 

From the manufactured treatment of exterior structures of colonial era imagery (which belies the trauma and violence endured within), to Taylor’s antithetical display of reality in response, to Galanis’ genuine and vulnerable look at the local interior - we are not used to seeing Bahamian homes stripped of the usual markers of colonial or decolonial contexts. Schmid simply reduces the space to its bare bones, stripping it of the more complex and meaty elements (quoins, porches, gardens with plants to identify our tropicality). He has in essence attempted to start fresh from the ashes of this deconstruction and destruction of the home, and in this attempt at building anew has carved out a new space for this body of work artistically as well. Given Schmid’s background as a mixed-heritage Bahamian, with Black African and White European influences, has set his work apart in a space that rejects fixity - not unlike the way his identity may also be seen as doing so. A German-Bahamian by blood and raised by a Black Bahamian mother, Schmid studied in Germany and also in Savannah, Georgia in the US (which it is worth noting is considered part of the Gullah-Geechee “corridor” that shares historical and cultural contexts with The Bahamas). He comes to his practice originally out of the very locally grounded space of the College of The Bahamas (now University of The Bahamas, where he is a key educator in the art department), before expanding his understanding of self and art in his studies abroad - in places that were simultaneously foreign and familiar in culture, again, not unlike the way he can be read in the Bahamian context. He does not sit squarely in colonial or anticolonial camps, but rather, there is a sincerity in this pioneering new space he is so attentively and caringly creating for himself and his family. 

Devoid of the usual aggression seen in his work, this body takes a very tender turn. The wooden pillars of “Acropolis I & II” (2023), and “Keystone” (2023), are seemingly typical of Schmid’s motif of crudely hacked wood, but the forcefulness and purposeful disintegration of material is softened here as the artist thinks through his new role as a father and provider. This shift in his treatment of material is, for the artist, something that comes with age. It is clear that Schmid is more confident in his practice, so there’s a simultaneous softening paired with decisiveness that is coming through in his mark-making, thanks perhaps to his new role as a father. He is “getting to the point”, to the core content of the work, and as a result of this paring back and stripping away of what isn’t necessary (as we can see in the “Home I-VI” (2023) series), the work is less decorative and busy. 

Schmid has decided against revisiting surfaces the way he used to - it is less about the “working” and almost more utilitarian and practical, which seems to echo the processes of coming to grips with becoming a parent. The body of investigations presented in “In this house is a home”  is a maturation of Schmid’s practice. This can perhaps be seen most easily in looking at his progress in learning to trust the initial mark-making, which gives a sense of calm that we are not used to encountering in his work, but this decisiveness is also paradoxically childlike in its roots exploration and play. The resulting series gives a breathiness and sense of consideration, with moments of childlike wonder in his recontextualization of material from the found environment (madeira pods, limestone, found wood). 

Schmid has garnered a reputation as an aggressive heavy-handed mark maker, but this shift in his focus gives the audience a more vulnerable space where we can see a wider range of how the artist is able to communicate. This vulnerable new space and life context for the artist have all forced Schmid into a space to redefine what home is - not just for him, but also for this new responsibility and the small person of whom he’s now in charge. Stepping back and looking at the physicality of home and its structure allows the work to be slightly more ongoing and in-process. Through exploring exterior spaces as a departure point, he uses this questioning of socially prescribed roles (as a man and father) to begin the conversation with himself, so he can define the interior on his own terms and as he sees it. “It’s not a conversation I was able to have with other men easily”, Schmid expressed in conversation. In this sense (and under postcolonial patriarchal conditioning) it would make sense then that the structure is the first thing to most comfortably explore.  Under patriarchy, men are traditionally expected to be “breadwinners” and responsible for material needs, without much thought to their emotional involvement or environment. Schmid believes he intuitively has some of this harder approach to it “doors are locked, they’re safe, there’s a physical structure that provides continuity and safety,” he shares in speaking to the nascent stages of his approach to the concept of home in this body of work. And, considering the very intentional consideration of Schmid’s framing materials for the wall-based works, with his utilization of construction-grade wood, he gives a nod to his expected masculine role as a home-builder (as opposed to the more feminine home-maker). However, there is an irony within this, as the softness and care with which these structural elements are rendered is done with a view to the traditional feminine role of making home. This puts Schmid squarely between two seemingly disparate roles which, again, is not unlike the niche space he inhabits demographically with his mixed background. 

A home of one’s own

Within this space of home rebuilding and remaking, making home “in translation”, there is something profoundly Caribbean in experiencing the work - despite the very specific demographics Schmid himself inhabits and problematizes as a mixed heritage Bahamian. It gives us the sense of displacement and lack of fixed place we are used to with his work - for example, black boxes with roofs that are not grounded in space - but the sincerity underlying it is deeply rooted in Caribbean postcolonial resilience, determination, and care. What could be more Caribbean than being able to build a home out of a space that was not intended for your survival? Schmid’s explorations beyond the post-colonial script become for us an act of defiance and love both, building a strong foundation for the sense of home he unpacks within. 

Exhibition: In This House Is a Home