By Cayman Compass Contributor Christopher Tobutt
You don’t so much visit Manavelins 4 as drift into it. One moment you’re passing Chisholm’s Supermarket on Rum Point Drive, the next you’re easing your car onto a patch of rough, uneven ground. The field around is a tangle of overgrowth and rusting industrial machinery being reclaimed by vines, creepers and salt air.
in the middle of it all stands the unfinished shell of a house. No roof. No windows. Just bare block walls open to the sky like a story someone began and forgot the ending. This is Gram Bella’s Project Space – not a gallery, but a possibility. It’s a place paused between what it was meant to be and what it might become. The idea is a spark set to ignite a fire of collective creativity – yes – right there in North Side.
It is the perfect vessel for Kerwin G. Ebanks’ open‑air exhibition, ‘Manavelins 4’. The word manavelins is an old nautical and Scottish dialect term meaning odds and ends, scraps, leftovers lying around.
Step through the doorway and the world shifts. Colours appear before shapes – the muted blues, sun‑bleached reds and chalky yellows of plastics that have spent too long drifting between currents. They’re like memories of things you can’t quite place.
A statement on the wall explains: “In 2018 Caymanian multi‑disciplinary artist Kerwin G. Ebanks began working almost exclusively with trash washed up on Cayman’s shores.” Another line reads: “This unspeakable volume of trash comes from all around the Caribbean – and even as far as South America.”
There is truly something ghostlike about all of it: items once held by unknown hands, carrying stories we will never hear, arriving on our beaches like incomplete messages.
In the centre of the room, a life‑sized shark rises from the floor, assembled from fragments of fibreglass and fishing line.
Just inside the entrance, tall cylindrical bottles stand on platforms at different heights, labelled like coral species in a children’s textbook. Step back, and the arrangement becomes a reef – cold and dead.
‘Life on the Line’ is a hawksbill turtle, made from papier‑mâché and aluminium beneath layers of fishing line that bind it like a mummified child. Its black eyes meet yours – pleading, accusing. Above it, a frigate bird, also entwined in fishing line, circles restlessly on a wire, casting an eerie shadow that looks exactly like the silhouette of the real bird gliding overhead. The shadow is beautiful. The solid form, a nightmare.
In ‘Boiling Point’, hundreds of tiny squares cut from disposable lighters form stained‑glass‑like mosaics. It’s about Cayman’s coral dying in rising temperatures. Stand back, and the pieces resolve into images that never fully reveal themselves like warnings half‑heard.
‘Vain Pursuit’ is a mermaid forming a spiral vortex, her own little galaxy, composed of hair, tail, and a swirl of sun – glints on sea like a thousand stars. She has gathered a great many tawdry plastic hair clips with innocent pride. She is beautiful, majestic and totally unaware that her multitude of treasures are worthless.
Manavelins 4 doesn’t simply display marine debris. It resurrects it, letting all the ghosts murmur at once.
The exhibition runs until 27 June at Gram Bella’s Project Space, Rum Point Drive, North Side. Open 24 hours.
Christopher Tobutt is a freelance journalist who has written for various publications in the Cayman Islands since 2003
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