ANINA MAJOR

Anina Major (she/her) is a visual artist from the Bahamas. 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. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship and serving as a mentor for the Saint Heron Ceramics Residency Program. Her work has been exhibited in The Bahamas, across the United States, and Europe and featured in permanent collections that include the National Gallery of The Bahamas, RISD Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Hi Anina! Thanks for joining me for Mint Tea. To begin, what’s your favorite tea? If you don’t drink tea, what kind of coffee or drink do you enjoy the most?

Well, the drink I enjoy the most is water, but I do drink tea, and I do not drink coffee. It just so happens that this morning I had a moringa mint tea, but I usually like the fruit teas, like a hibiscus tea or passion is really good. I'm a fruit tea kind of girl.

Could you tell me about your background and your practice?

I guess the best way to say is that I think of myself as a storyteller, slash artist, slash anthropologist, slash historian that likes to put together these kinds of expressions of experiences, and I'm always looking for ways to translate one story into another language. I work primarily with ceramics – I think that's where I am right now. And I think, for me, that has been a really great material to kind of archive and document these kinds of experiences that I'm trying to translate or create. That can range from anything, mainly because I think that there's no one way to tell a story.

Are there other mediums that you work with?

I think I work with all mediums. I think right now I have been doing mostly sculpture, but I'm venturing out into installation. And video has always been kind of in the background, for me, and a little bit of performance. I would say that I'm always constantly trying to find the balance of which medium is at the forefront. It takes a backseat when delivering a message, like when I'm telling a story in an installation.

I am the most familiar with your ceramic sculptures, installations and performances. Can you talk about how and why you choose to work with the media that you do?

So, with this ceramic work, that comes from a really intimate place. I love objects. So let's start with what we love, right? I like objects, I love the stories that they tell, and in many ways, I consider myself an object maker. And so when I think about being an object's maker, and its identity behind that, there are a series of questions I've always asked myself that include, “Who are you? What objects are you making? And how would you make them?” And when I asked those questions, I instantly think of what my first introduction to making was, and that would be experiences I had with my late grandmother, who was a straw bender, she made objects for the straw market to sell to tourists, and that was her livelihood. So, I think about those lessons primarily because she would make these kinds of bags and dolls and all kinds of souvenirs from a flat pattern that, when stitched together would become three-dimensional. So when someone shows to me, an object, I kind of naturally see the breakdown of how that can be flattened out and then brought back into three dimensions. That kind of led me through my own kind of realization of who I am as a maker, and what lineage or history that I'm leveraging, or that I inherited, with my own work. And so my ceramic sculptures are usually woven, and I engage in this type of weaving called plaiting that is from the Bahamas, where I'm from – born and raised. So engaging in that way, in some ways I'm telling a story of where I'm from, and where I am, and where I'm going. For me, that ties into this idea of culture and how it evolves, and what contributes to it, and what influences it, and I think that weaving or plaiting is a really interesting mode of communication. So for me, it's a language that I engage with, that has its own kind of historical references that I'm using to communicate and tell my stories. And that's where the ceramic sculptures come in.

I understand that that language is not recognizable to everyone, and it's not a a word-to-word translation. However, I do think that it has the ability to anchor certain experiences, and that's where the installations come in, to help contextualize whatever story I'm telling. So if you think about it, it's like the weaving is the language, and the installation is really kind of the context in which you're receiving that message. And sometimes that ends up having video to accompany it, sound, or performance. I think that in all of my work, there is a little bit of me interjected, and how I communicate that or how I share that is through its composition. I don't think I can always tell the story with a static sculpture, because at times I view the sculpture as the after effect, as the result of me engaging in a certain way to produce this object. As the viewer, I sometimes want to bring you a little bit to the earlier stages of the experiences, what got us to this point, essentially.

What projects are you working on now?

Right now I'm working towards my solo show at Shoshana Wayne gallery that opens in September. But I just recently opened two shows. One of them is a solo presentation at Wave Hill in the Bronx, and that installation is titled, “Garden Hills: Reflections in Memory Yard.” That was really a composition that came together around themes of spirituality, protection, faith, care, nurturing environments, all in the context of a Black garden. I think I was looking through these kinds of questions and asking myself, what kind of space would that be, if I was to create my own Eden? What would be the symbols that would exist in that space? So a lot of objects and elements speak to the themes of protection, spirituality, and nurturing, all in relation to home.

If I was to describe it, it's a platform that has a video piece. Inscribed on the platform is my memory of my childhood home floor plan. There are these references to lack of water, or water, there's a cutout in the platform that seems like a puddle that you look down into, and it's a video piece. And in that video piece, there are fragments of Jamaica Kincaid talking about her introduction to the garden through her mother, and how her mother’s relationship with the garden was one that was kind of nurturing, and at times violent, and how she adopted her own special relationship with the garden and how her children responded to the garden. It also has scenes of folklore that I knew of growing up as a child that involved these kinds of concepts of children not straying too far from home, and this idea of burying an umbilical cord so that the child, no matter where they travel, remains grounded and rooted to this particular place. And it also brings in some of my favorite childhood moments in the garden, like laying on the grass and staring up at the sky and hearing, and hearing my neighbor practice being a DJ with random reggae songs blasting into the air, so for me, that was easy to express through video.

But then through the sculptures, kind of these carriers of life, there's two spider plants, which have become very common in the home. Their origins are from the continent of Africa, but they've become very universal now across the globe. They're the one of the most common home plans, they kind of thrive really, really well, it's really hard to kill them, and so there are two of them inside the installation. And they kind of for me represent the youth in the house – it was me and my sibling, it was only the two of us. They're titled “Tia and Tamara,” and they rest within these kind of vessel woven sculpture pieces that I created as offering bowls, using the same plaiting technique. And they sit there – one of them has a glass machete near it as this kind of protective energy against all outside forces – and they sit within this installation within this floor plan.

And then there's a tower house that’s huge and woven, which I would like to think is the source of water for this whole environment. It's kind of empty. But it still has remnants of blues, and it speaks back to this kind of reference of blue as a color of protection that's pretty popular in a lot of folklore. And surrounding all of this environment are my crushed shells and crushed ceramic work that ground these blue bottle trees. The blue bottle trees represent the guardians of the home, and traditionally, this is a southern African American culture within gardens, you would often see these glass bottle trees that were to protect the garden – spirits would get caught in these bottles, and therefore be confused and not be able to harm the home. It originally started somewhere in the ninth century in the Congo, but you still see it popping up today. Again, another symbol of protection for this particular space.

So the installation that I just described is really all-encompassing, but it's all these symbols of protection, and the same for the crushed shells. I mean, a shell ultimately is a home that's kind of fragile and acts as a form of protection. Lately I've been incorporating that into my work as another kind of hidden messaging, and layering in some more meaning to the way that I'm engaging. And the way that I build with ceramics, at times, can be seen as an exoskeleton of sorts – a shell. There's one piece inside the installation that's like a wreath, but also like a floatie, or also could be looked at as this ring. But it's again, an exoskeleton of that, and there is an interior and exterior to it. So I think I kind of go back and forth between all of these reads, and try to put together experiences that are very layered and nuanced. This particular one, I'm still processing, but it is bringing a lot of themes of youth, life, death, love, destruction, all of those things just melted into a big pot.

You seamlessly incorporate the vernacular of craft within your ceramic work. Can you talk more about your ceramic weaving technique and how it began?

Well, ceramic has a load of history, and it's related to craft. And I think that for me, my relationship to craft really has to do with the forms of artistic expression that I was introduced to first, before I knew art and craft. So whether my grandmother would call herself an artist, I don't know if she would – like, she would probably call herself a businesswoman before she did that. But I think she's an artist. And so the vernacular of craft is really important to me, because I understand for some communities that that is the artistic expression. Not necessarily painting, per se. A lot of my work, they don't function in any other way. It's not like you can carry anything in these sculptures, they really are just manifestations of a time, and a series of actions that I took, and an environment that I created that resulted in these objects. That's the way I view them. So it's just really interesting to see people try to place them into a very strict kind of object base that's related to something that they've seen before. Because in my head, they're not, I'm not even creating them with an object in mind. So it's really interesting, and I think that, again, going back to them as a language, they have the ability to have several different conversations. I think that's just because of the nature of what I'm referencing. The weaving that my grandmother engaged in was with palms, dried palms. So she had this relationship with nature and the land that is a little different from me. I'm not weaving palms, I'm weaving clay, which I guess is still from the earth, but we've differed in those two elements. But again, it still speaks to this nod to our relationship with nature. And so at any moment, if I wanted to use this language to talk more about nature, I think it makes sense, which is why the weaving shows up in the garden. It just cannot not show up in the garden.

I notice a lot of organic forms in your “Balance Acts” series and in the performance “Heavy is the Head.” What inspires the forms of your ceramic sculptures? Are you inspired by nature when working with clay?

I think when I engage with the spikes, I am. It's interesting, because when I first started working with clay, I was in a very vulnerable place. I was actually coming to terms with the fact that I probably would never live in the Bahamas again. I was like parsing through all these like things emotionally, and I just wanted objects in my space that reflected where I was from, and so I created these spike objects, they were first inspired by sea urchins and other kinds of fruit objects that I see at home. I just was really determined to have elements that were similar to, or inhabited the spirit of this particular place, because in some ways, I felt that I was separate and apart from it, and so the spike series really came from that. Thinking back through why I was creating those things, I was trying to protect something that I valued. And I'm still doing that. I’m still protecting this creative language of plaiting. I'm protecting it and making sure that it exists in a way that can survive through certain kinds of worldly challenges, right? So these spike pieces were really about protecting the spirit of this place where I had come from, and trying to make sure that even though I had traveled and I was setting up home in another place, that I was still able to remain connected. And I think, again, me engaging in plaiting is doing the same thing.  The thing about it is, when I first started doing that kind of work, it wasn't just the sea urchin. I was referencing all aquatic textures. I think the sea urchin to me just seemed like the most powerful one. So it was like the sea urchin, the blowfish, these are all things that I naturally was driven to – there was something about them. I don't know, with the blowfish it's voluminous, it starts off really small but then it pops out. I just like that dynamic, I love the idea that something so beautiful could be harmful.

With the performance “Heavy is the Head,” that was around the time that I was making the sea urchins. I think it was before the pandemic, it was that summer, I don't know if you remember this summer, but what it was that summer, like 2016, when it was like every other day, you'd wake up and hear about some police shooting, or somebody dying at the hands of police violence. It was just so heavy that summer. I just remember being so heavy, and just feeling the weight of having to go out in the world and be normal. I felt that physically, and I just really didn't know how else to express that kind of pressure, the pressure of knowing that something so valuable could be taken so quickly, and you’re supposed to be over it, or it's supposed to be insignificant. I was in a lot of pain, and I wanted to physically show that, and I didn't know how else to do that. So one day, I was playing around, I was like, “Yeah, put the spike thing on my head, let's see how long I can tolerate that pain.” And it still is an exercise in trying to illustrate what it's like to tolerate that pain, but also an exercise in vulnerability. I first did it in 2016, and then I performed it last year. But last year when I performed it, it was an exercise in vulnerability. There's so many things that go through my head, like, if I'm expressing this pain, does anybody see it? And is anybody interested in sharing that pain or easing that pain? And then what did it mean for me to allow myself, in a public space like that, to allow strangers to have that level of vulnerability? I mean, I'm a very private person. So deep inside, no, I really don't want to share my pain. I don’t want you to have any part of it. It's all mine. You don't get to see any of that. So that was a real challenge for myself.

Again, I make this work mainly because I'm trying to parse through some real personal shit. And I'm doing it in a somewhat public way. But I really try to answer questions for myself. Hopefully, in doing that, and sharing that with others, it will allow them to come to a space where they ask those questions, or they're prompted to see things differently or act differently. I didn't really know how that performance was going to go, but it was a series of questions for myself. Like, what was the level of vulnerability that I was comfortable with exhibiting with strangers? And it also was a moment of, was this something I want to do? Nobody else. Nobody else is in this equation, just me having this experience and sharing it and trying to figure out where or how I was processing it. And so, to what we might have been talking about earlier about, who is this work for? Whether I like this work or not, I can't be bothered to spend time on something that I don't like, I can't be bothered to spend time on something that's not healing, or fulfilling for me, I just don't have that much time and energy in the world, there's so many other things that I could be doing that could be beneficial. And so I think that our work can be really healing for us. Again, most of the time our work is by ourselves. Sometimes, most times it gets into the work. For me, it's in the work, I'm by myself all the time – it’s in the work!

What is your creative process like? How is it similar or different when you are working on a sculpture, an installation, or a performance?

I don't think it's any different across the board. I think what happens for me is I start thinking through these ideas, and I started doing them, and then they just started evolving. Like, that's the best way I can say it, they just started evolving. The questions, for me come up when it's like – okay, here's a good example. When I was at a residency in Cape Cod, I noticed that the driveways were being lined with shells. You could drive on them and they were all crushed. And there were mountains of shells, you’d go and buy them like you buy dirt. I was like, wow, that's really interesting, graphically I'm drawn to this phenomenon, so much about it resonates for me, because work that I don't like in my studio, I destroy and make into these crushed ceramic shards. So I'm seeing these formal similarities between these shells and the shards, and I go, “Okay, bring them back to the studio,” and I go and I get a bucket of these crushed shells. I bring them back to the studio, and I'm just like, wow, I never thought about my shards in that way. I do think about shells in the sense that I use shells when I'm doing atmospheric firing, to protect the shelves that you put the piece on. But I never thought about them formally as this graphic element, and now they seem to be speaking to something that's already happening my studio, unbeknownst to me, something that I may think of as trash, right? Because at some point, I ended up discarding all the shards. But I was like, “Oh my gosh, I've been collecting these shards for years. Let me just go ahead with the shells, and see what happens!” And I'm mixing with the shells, and then I was doing an installation and I was like, “Let me test this out – I like this!” I like this, kind of shells representing the ground and then juxtaposed – to me they look like the absence of water. That's my thought. So I said “Okay, let's get them down on the ground. Let's see what that looks like.” And in putting them down on the ground I realized that they have this beautiful sound because I'm moving them around and stepping on them, I feel it – just a beautiful soundtrack. Well, there you go. Now I'm working on a performance for this beautiful sound, and thinking through how that plays together.

That's when I started to really think through those fragments. I had been also reading Derek Walcott, who has a poem called “Fragments of Epic Memory.” I always said that was beautiful, because he's talking about the Caribbean experience, and how you have these fragments that contribute to this greater whole, it's not really a full linear history, like you don't get all the parts. Stuart Hall is another person I was reading at the time who talks about this, and actually makes a comment about how to be from the Caribbean is like a broken vase that gets put back together, but there's all these fragments. So fragments was a thing for me. I just didn't know where it was gonna end up yet. And it still is a thing, but now, physically seeing it, working through it, I think it's becoming more charged in how I use it.

So the other show that I opened up recently was a group show at Grounds for Sculpture. I have a piece called “Ostracons of the Atlantic.” It's basically shards of different ceramic things and crushed shells from three different places. You've got cowrie shells from the continent of Africa, you've got clam shells from New England, and you've got conch shells from the Bahamas. I was really telling a material story there, through these fragments, of a particular trade. To me, it was about telling a story in a material way through these fragments. That piece for me is all about a journey. Which direction, what was being transported? We don't really know, but these shells are indicative of all of that. And it just plays on that notion that history, and what we know about people, is through ceramics, and through ceramic shards, essentially.

It was incredible seeing your performance for “Haven No. 3” at Socrates Sculpture Park. Do you think about creating the installation first or do you start by considering the performance that will activate it?

So in that specific incident, it was about the piece first, and then the performance came later. I don't always think about a performance with my installations. I don't always think about a video I. Like I said, as I'm working through it, I think about what the work wants and needs. I knew for Wave Hill that I wanted to do something that references Black women in their relationship to gardens, and how that translates, hereditary wise, and how there are these common denominators across the African diaspora. I knew that I wanted to do that, and I thought as I was putting together that work, the best place to go was the first place that I knew of is a garden, and then in doing that, I just started to think about my experiences in that garden. And that's where the video came about, like I wasn’t originally going to do a video for that piece. For me it was like the video really grounds and gives a visual representation of the things that may be happening in this space that you're experiencing. Like, it's like a portal to another time, you know?

Can you talk about any imagery or symbols that you like to work with?

I don't know if I have any symbols as much as I have things that have multiple meanings being placed in these contexts. Like the bottle trees, like the shells like the weaving, like the plants. Even the hieroglyphic kind of engraving that I did at Wave Hill. I don't necessarily know that they have meaning. I think I'm actually the one that's creating symbols, but I think that I infuse meaning from things that we might have already known of.

What are your favorite colors? Do they find their way into your artworks?

My favorite color is yellow. I love yellow. I love yellow, like yellow is my jam. Does it find its way into my work? I think it does. Not always. But yeah, it's definitely up there as one of my favorites. I have a lot of colors that I like, because I think they generate a different kind of energy. So that's why I'm not sure – in my head, a form of yellow always makes it into my work, but that's not necessarily true. And I think it has to do with the story, and the mood, and the temperament of the story that I'm doing with the work. But just as Anina on a regular day, yellow is the jam.

Is there a new medium that you would like to try or to work in more?

No, not really – not right now. I mean, I would love to get into the metals at some point. But to me, engaging with a new material has to have some meaning beyond just a new material. I think it has to mean something. For example, I rarely do anything else in ceramics. I only weave in ceramics mostly, and then the shards. I don't do anything else in ceramics, like I don't build traditionally out of coil. Once I stopped making the spikes, there's nothing much else I do with ceramics. Because for me, the way that I'm engaging with clay is for a specific reason. If I was to venture into a new material, it would be because that material is contributing to a story in a certain way. So right now I'd love to continue to work with wood and video and expand my language and base with those, and how I use those materials.

Where are you located now? Do you think where you are located influences your practice?

I don't know, because I travel a lot to get my work done, and so I don't know if location experience influences it as much. But I do travel home regularly. So for me, I think there's always a re-centering that happens when I do that that allows me to kind of recharge the work. That's why when people are like where are you? I'm like, “somewhere in the northern hemisphere, I'm in the ether.”

How do you stay connected to your community?

You know, that's a good question. I think it's like an active act. I'm constantly speaking to them. And, you know, thank God for WhatsApp and social media, it's a good way. But like I said, I visit home a lot, and I think that that helps. And when you're an artist – this is one of the great things about being an artist – is that you kind of create the world that you want. You have the power to do that. And so I want to be connected with this community, and so I just come up with reasons to be connected. Like, I want to do a piece and work about this, then I now have a reason to go and be connected. So for me, how I stay connected is by continuing to work.

What’s your favorite tool?

My hands, because I pretty much can build with my hands only. I mean, there's some supplementary tools, but at the end of the day, my hand is the tool. If I was stranded and only had my hands, I'd be fine.

What is the space where you do your work?

I think I do most of my work in my head. As a person who is having to move about a lot to get things to actualize physically, I do a lot of work in my head. And I've become pretty good at making work in a really small space. So I've been lately saying that I work wherever I am. Wherever that is, I work. I might not be able to do all facets, but I can do work wherever I physically am.

Do you have any ritual that helps you get into the zone?

No, I got rituals that take me out of the zone. I'm always in the zone. I'm always in the zone, like literally, always in the zone. I have rituals to take me out of the zone. Even when I'm not trying I'm in the zone, so I have rituals that take me out of the zone so that I can rest and recharge. But I'm pretty much always in the zone, because when I'm walking through life, I'm looking at life and these are all experiences that give me things to think about.

When do you know when you are finished with your artwork or a body of work?

I don't know. I don't know when I'm finished. Because I thought I was done with the spike pieces a couple of years ago, and then I made one a couple years ago. So I don't know when I'm done. I don't put those kinds of limitations on myself. I do what feels right for the time that I'm in. I said I was going to stop making the straw dolls, I just made some this summer and actually I'm trying to make some more for another installation next year. So I don't know when I'm done with a body of work, because who knows when I will be inspired to infuse new life into that body of work. Who knows, because I also think that work has a life of its own, and it changes meaning over time. I would never deny myself the opportunity to revisit something that may be taking on a new meaning at this point in time. Those spike pieces had a meaning for me back then, so did the straw dolls. Who knows how I'm going to feel about them next year. They might have a different cadence or weight or significance that lends itself to what I want to talk about. And so I don't know if I ever end a body of work. None of these bodies of work will be done until I'm not making any more. Then they’ll be finished. Then you can be like, “that’s a body of work,” but until then, I think it's just about where my focus is right now. And then who knows? I don't.

Who are your favorite practicing artists?

Oh my gosh, I have so many favorite practicing artists. That's such an unfair question to ask. What I can say is just recently, I saw a good friend of mine, Tiffany Smith's show, at the Bronx Museum, and I loved it. A young Yu and Nicholas Oh are always at the top of my list, I’m digging those recent performances. Antonius Bui is always a solid go to for me just because they're so brave, and so heartfelt. When I think about infusing emotion into my work, they just hit it. They just hit it for me. Jeffrey Meris, he just opened up a show. I love the way he layers in emotion, and he’s very thoughtful in the work. Faith Ringgold show at the New Museum just came down, so I had to go see that. I went to Nicole Eisenman at Hauser and Werth, which was really nice. I don't know, there's so many artists. Simone Leigh just opened up the US Pavilion at the Venice Bienalle. Blue Curry, he's in London. There are some artists that aren't as well known, like Jodi Minnis. I'm probably forgetting someone. But yeah, there's just so many different artists out there doing things that I love and admire that it's hard to name just a few.

What gives you the feeling of butterflies in your stomach?

I don't know if I've even had butterflies lately, but I guess I would say opening the kiln. Opening the kiln is always a very sensitive, emotionally charged moment. And people are always like, “Oh, I want to be there.” And I'm like, this is a sensitive time for me! I really need you to back up. Because you have no idea what could happen. You have some idea, but you're praying that your idea is still on point.

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