By Christopher Tobutt
Some exhibitions show you art. “Medium: The Materiality of Making” at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands shows you how art becomes real – how Cayman’s artists take memory, dream, revelation and imagination, and give them shape through the stubborn, miraculous thing we call medium.
The journey begins with colour, the oldest artistic language. Al Ebanks’ “Cayman Sun” glows with late-afternoon warmth, capturing the emotional temperature of Cayman itself. His acrylics feel steeped in memory – a reminder that colour can summon place as vividly as a story.
Then Gladwyn K. “Miss Lassie” Bush shifts colour into revelation. In “He Is Risen”, her acrylics tremble with visionary urgency. Miss Lassie didn’t paint with technique; she painted with conviction. Even her painted jug becomes a devotional object, proof that the sacred can hide in the ordinary.
C.E. Whitney’s sketchbooks show colour as process – the private rehearsal of imagination – while Bendel Hydes’ “Light in August” turns colour into atmosphere. His oils breathe like weather, offering a contemplative stillness that feels almost spiritual.
From colour, the exhibition moves into form – the moment when ideas become bodies. Clay remembers the hands that shaped it; stone remembers the force that carved it. Sculptures in this gallery tell stories of identity, nature and tradition. Some works echo the human figure, others distill natural forms into abstraction, all proving that form is how artists give their ideas weight.
Then the exhibition shifts into “Field”, where the viewer becomes part of the story. Karoly Szücs’ stainless-steel works – “Ice Lava and Chaos” – reflect your body back at you, pulling you into their fractured surfaces. You see yourself seeing. You become part of the artwork’s tension.
Ebanks returns with “What Holds Us Together”, an installation of silver thatch rope and metal hardware. It is both object and metaphor – a physical poem about community and the strands that bind Caymanian life. You cannot simply look at it; you must navigate around it. Your movement becomes part of its meaning.
Finally, the exhibition dissolves into the “Digital Sphere”, where material becomes light and stories become code. Michael Mothen’s “Signals in the Sky” is a digital animation – a dream rendered in motion and pixels. And Shane “Dready” Aquart’s “Moko Jumbies” bridges heritage and technology, turning Caribbean guardian figures into digital icons. Tradition survives by evolving.
Step back, and the exhibition reveals its message: Artists are storytellers. Medium is their language. Material is their voice.
Colour tells stories of emotion. Form tells stories of presence. Field tells stories of interaction. Digital tells stories of possibility.
Together, Cayman’s artists show that imagination is not abstract – it is something you can see, touch, walk around, or watch unfold in light. “Medium: The Materiality of Making” is their story, and now it becomes ours.
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