Article
5/05/23

Nostalgia, Strawcraft, and Sculpture in Anina Major’s “Old Week Home”

written by Simone Cambridge

Anina Major

Anina Major is a ceramics-based sculptor and multi-media artist using the Bahamian practice of straw plaiting in clay, a non-traditional medium. Born in Nassau, Bahamas, Major’s exhibition is motivated by a foreword gaze nostalgically conscious of the past. Major’s exhibition, Old Week Home, reflects on the artist’s relationship with self and place, a theme that for Major engages with home, displacement, heritage, and the stories told to navigate these relationships. Major completed her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently making work from the North-eastern United States. Major has continued to navigate her artistic expression of home in a way that centres the personal and transcends space and locale.

While living in Brooklyn, Anina Major encountered a straw doll in a Brooklyn shop that was likely sold as a tourist object, only to eventually be discarded by a visitor on their return home, and later repurposed for sale. This doll, devoid of its original function and context in the Brooklyn shop, was to become an inspiration for Major’s creative practice as the she worked through her own experiences of displacement and connection to home living in the United States. The doll through its purpose as a souvenir was considered exotic, precious, and celebratory while later being replaceable, removeable, inconsequential, and dislocated. What was this doll’s story? Who made her? Who was the visitor that brought her here? Is the fate of this straw object, made using hours of practice and skill, meant only to be valuable for a short time? As a pleasant memory and to be tossed aside at a whim? The plight of the doll urged Major to consider how if the doll consisted of a different material, perhaps it would not be so easily discarded. Thus, Major turned to straw plaiting in clay.

Technique: Strawcraft in Sculpture

Major’s method of straw plaiting has expanded far beyond the tourist object or souvenir. The environment, dress, traditional storage, the body are all sources of inspiration for Major’s vessel-like ceramic sculpture. Major uses a process of atmospheric firing, repurposing a decades-old technique that is particularly relevant to the artist’s background and heritage. Shells, sand, sea glass, and found objects enter the kiln during the firing stage, warping the texture on the vessel and altering the quality of the glaze of each surface. Firing therefore connects the artist’s resulting sculpture to the places of origin of objects present in the kiln. Objects are allowed to break, suggesting an inability to be held, or to hold. Vessels mimic the body, the feminine figure, alluding to the women’s labour responsible for the industry of straw and the domestic labour done by women, one of strawcraft’s original purposes.

Major’s process consists of a unique clay mixture that includes added cotton pulp to create figures that hold form. Interlapping interwoven palm fronds or “strings” are created using strips of clay, giving new expression to traditional straw plait weaving patterns. Unlike commercial values of strawcraft, which emphasise the production of perfect objects for consumers, Major allows imperfection. Organic forms are permitted to collapse, gape, and become penetrable.

Old Week Home

Visual artist Anina Major continues her investigation into Bahamian strawcraft using ceramic sculpture and video installation in Old Week Home. The exhibition title takes its name from a New England festival that allowed former residents to return to their villages of origin after years of relocation. Located at TERN gallery, Old Week Home is Anina Major’s first solo exhibition in her hometown, after relocating to the United States in 1999. Childhood nostalgia and Bahamian women in straw industry are the focus of the exhibition, with special tribute to Major’s grandmother, Saphora Newbold.

Saphora Newbold was a straw vendor and Major’s journey to learning more about her grandmother was not straight forward. Information about Newbold’s life was scarce. Although Saphora Newbold produced and sold hundreds of straw goods, there was little trace of the prolific vendor, a familiar story in the straw industry. Tracking her grandmother was difficult because of the lack of record of authorship of her work. Each item becomes anonymous after it is sold, without trace of the harvester of straw, the plaiter, the seamstress, the embroiderer, and the vendor. As Major searched her family’s marriage records, she quickly found that listed certificates were patrilineal. Documents revealed little about her grandmother’s life and livelihood, centring on Newbold’s husband. Major pushes against this absence of her grandmother’s story in the archive and the anonymity of the number of Bahamian women in the strawcraft industry who are under recorded through this exhibition.

The Artwork, the Vessel, the Body, and Home

Old Week Home combines Major’s sculptural ceramic practice with her method of installation that calls attention to social, political, and historical change. An extension of Major’s autobiographical work, the exhibition addresses the vessel, family, and the reoccurring motif of the straw doll. Major abstracts the traditional form of the straw doll, while referencing the vessel-like structures used historically for multipurpose storage. The doll becomes vessel-like; the vessel gestures to the body. Deferring from practices in commercial straw goods, the process of constructing each sculpture is not obscured. Seams of plait meet at colliding angles and overlap at joined edges. Straw craft patterns and weaves are varied within the same sculpture. Sculptures are open, creating skeletal-like permeability.

The use of palettes in the gallery space of Old Week Home structures each piece in a geometric, grid-like frame, that juxtaposes the curvature of Major’s sculpture. The palettes also reference movement and migration, due to the nature of their common use to ship and transport the goods by air and sea. As an artist who is herself travelling between locations, the display of Anina Major’s work reflects the literal movement of the art object she creates and alludes to her own movement.

The titles of the sculpture in Old Week Home, reference local tradition, dialect, and themes of family and childhood. While her practice is inspired by traditional techniques, Major’s sculptures exceed the scale of commercial straw goods, becoming larger than life. A projection in TERN’s gallery space shows Major straw plaiting, showing part of her creative process. The presence of the artist depicted in the act of making connects the artist’s discourse of origin, heritage, and movement to Bahamian soil, as represented by the geographical space of the exhibition.

In Major’s, Tree (2023), three vessels of woven straw-clay are connected in a single stacked form. The glazed colour of the sculpture deepens at the base of the object, suggesting a rootedness in place. The artist calls the viewer to consider what is held in multiplicity of form, perhaps alluding to the layering of knowledge and practice through lineage.

Wrap Around (2023) is a protected form, a layered vessel, and also an object where aesthetic usurps function as the sculpture resists the functionality of traditional straw work. The artwork is glazed in layered blue greens under sand-toned plaits of straw. Wrap Around’s wide, round shape is made massive, heavy, and immobile, referencing the storage vessel. What is protected and kept by the object is hidden from the viewer, suggesting preciousness.

In Ruby’s Easter Hat (2023) the familiar becomes abstracted in whimsical form. Was an Easter hat, a garment that is already attached to an air of femininity, celebration, and elegance, has taken new dimension in Major’s hand. The sculpture merges different patterns and textures of straw plait, changing in hue and opacity throughout the work. “Ruby” alludes to the name of the wearer of the “hat” but also the sculpture’s deep fuchsia crimson, evoking the flesh and bone in its elongated form. The function suggested by the title is defeated, becoming an impossible object that instead directs the viewer to its aesthetic value.

Similarly, Bubble (2023), resists and breaks with its title. This sculpture is in opposition to the lightweight, transparent, and transient idea of a bubble in our everyday lives. Shown breaking, bursting, and splintered with sea glass, this vessel is permanent, heavy, solid, and grounded in place while the gritty texture of the work is enhanced by sand at its edges. Major’s warped clay straw pattern suggests not spontaneity but hours of plaiting and manipulation that was careful and time consuming.

Mother (2023) shows a body-like figure, that counters other representational straw figures in Major’s body of work. A head and torso are made visible through layered straw plait that consist of different styles of weave in uneven curvature. Patterns overlap, become jagged, and leave gaps in this feminine matrilineal figure that is revealed to be imperfect as woven ends are left exposed, layered at impossible angles that cannot possibly be sewn together..

Major’s Bad Gyal Series (2023) questions the function of the straw doll. Moving beyond the anonymous souvenir, a keepsake that must totalize the experience of a place, the dolls are contextualized through the artist’s use of the name plate. Glazed in undulating tawny sepias and sun-bleached khakis, each doll presents a story of their own for the viewer’s consideration. For example, Sweet Gyal, in its title and gilded name plate, uses slang to contextualize the sculpture in dialect, revealing a locality explicitly contented to the use of the phrase “sweet gyal” and creating a memory-evoking dialogue with the viewer.

Crawfish Armor (2023) is a sculpture that centres the “crawfish” or spiny lobster, a Bahamian cultural staple, as its aesthetic and historical reference. The artwork is spined, dotted, and elongated in brilliant scarlet, persimmon, and sienna, inspired by the fins, legs, and tails of the native animal and food popular food source. The skeletal foundation of the work, beginning in cage-like limbs crested with clustered ridges, also references the original fishing devices used to trap and harvest crawfish, which were crafted using strawcraft. The open straw basin topping Crawfish Armor directs the viewer back to this history.

Conclusion

Old Week Home at TERN Gallery in Nassau, Bahamas, showcases artist Anina Major’s return to analyzing her heritage through her practice. Major honors her grandmother, Saphora Newbold, through her practice of straw plaiting in clay medium and explores her relationship to home in the artworks. Memory, on varying personal and collective scales, is a consistent theme in Old Week Home as Major negotiates her displacement from and connection to The Bahamas, as she lives and works primarily in the United States. The gallery space echoes this tension framing Major’s artwork in movement, migration, and cross-border exchange. Themes of the environment, language, straw industry, girlhood, and family intersect in Old Week Home to create a narrative of hometown return that gestures to the past.

Anina Major is a visual artist from the Bahamas whose work investigates the relationships between self and place as a way of cultivating moments of reflection and a sense of belonging. Her decision to voluntarily establish a home contrary to the location in which she was born and raised motivates her to investigate the relationship between self and place as a site of negotiation. By utilizing the vernacular of craft to reclaim experiences and relocate displaced objects, her practice exists at the intersection of nostalgia, and identity. Often taking form in a wide range of media, including installation, sculpture, time-based video, and performance, it references tropical ecologies as well as historical and contemporary ethnography. Her work unpacks the emotional complexities inherent to the transcultural dialogue that surfaces when mapping the migration of traditions versus foreign influences. Through her making, Major acts as a cultural strategist and works to inspire critical dialogue around developing cultural identities and building the appropriate platforms for this discourse.

Exhibition: Old Week Home