For many artists, the journey away from home becomes a story of departure. For Bahamian ceramic artist Anina Major, it has become a lifelong investigation into what remains. Across more than a decade of practice, Major has established herself as one of the most compelling voices working in contemporary ceramics today, creating sculptures that examine migration, memory, cultural inheritance, and the complex emotional terrain of belonging. Working primarily with clay, she transforms a material deeply connected to the earth into vessels that hold stories of movement, displacement, and return. Her works do not simply occupy space; they carry histories, embody absences, and invite reflection on the ways identity is continuously shaped through lived experience.
Born and raised in The Bahamas, Major left home to pursue her education in the United States, initially believing the move would be temporary. Yet, like many members of the Caribbean diaspora, what began as a period of study gradually evolved into a life lived between geographies. It was within this experience of inhabiting multiple worlds simultaneously that many of the central concerns of her practice emerged. Drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, Major began exploring the emotional and cultural realities of migration, asking what happens when one’s understanding of home becomes fragmented across distance, memory, and time. Through her work, she examines how identity is negotiated between locations, how cultural traditions travel with people, and how belonging can exist in a state of continual transformation.
These themes find powerful expression in Tender Seedlings, Major’s first solo exhibition with Larkin Durey, on view in London from 5 June to 3 July 2026 and presented during London Gallery Weekend 2026 (5–7 June). Inspired by the poem Seedling by Bahamian writer A. L. Major, the exhibition reflects on the emotional realities of leaving home, building lives elsewhere, and navigating the uncertain terrain between departure and return. The poem speaks of migration not as a singular event but as an ongoing condition—one marked by nostalgia, longing, resilience, and reinvention. Through a new body of woven ceramic sculptures and vessels, Major translates these ideas into physical form, creating works that hold childhood memories, family histories, cultural traditions, and the tensions of diasporic existence. The exhibition arrives at a significant moment in the artist’s career, as her work continues to gain international recognition, entering major museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and York Art Gallery, while preparations are underway for her forthcoming exhibition The Sacred Mangrove at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Photography credit Andrew T. White | Copyright The Artist; Courtesy Larkin Durey.
In this conversation with Africans Column, Major reflects on her artistic journey, the influence of Bahamian culture and craft traditions, the conceptual possibilities of clay, and how art can become a space where multiple histories, identities, and geographies coexist.
Africans Column: Your work often navigates questions of migration, belonging, and identity. Looking back, what first drew you to these themes, and how has your understanding of them evolved throughout your practice?
Anina Major: Well, I left the Bahamas to attend college in Philadelphia. In fact, coming to the UK was a consideration but I settled on the US. Initially this was a temporary move with all intentions of returning home but life changed that. And it was in that moment that I became acutely aware of how my sense of place and belonging was influencing my trajectory. I wanted to explore those emotions deeply. I read the works of writers such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, among others who explored and processed that experience in their writing.
Photography credit Andrew T. White | Copyright The Artist; Courtesy Larkin Durey.
Africans Column: Tender Seedlings takes its title and inspiration from A. L. Major’s poem Seedling. What was it about this text that resonated so deeply with you, and how did it shape the development of this body of work?
Anina Major: The poem attempts to articulate the emotions associated with leaving the place you come to know as home for education, establishing a home elsewhere yet maintaining a close connection with the former location and the inbetweeness of simultaneously belonging to two places but not necessarily feeling accepted in either. The whole experience of the show is to encapsulate those moments within a carrier form, such as a vessel.
Africans Column: Throughout the exhibition, childhood memories, family histories, and experiences of displacement appear to intertwine. How do you approach translating such personal narratives into objects that can also speak to broader collective experiences?
Anina Major: I believe that it happens through my method of making the works. Plaiting and weaving is my way of engaging with a practice that connects me to my Bahamian culture and grounds my perspective of future lived experiences. My grandmother was a straw vendor and she made objects out of palms by ‘plaiting’ and sewing. I have adopted this method of making within my practice.
Africans Column: Clay occupies a fascinating position in your practice. It is simultaneously fragile and enduring, rooted and transformable. What makes ceramics the most appropriate language for exploring ideas of migration, memory, and home?
Anina Major: Good question… to which I would say, clay IS the conceptual framework. It establishes connections between the body to the land, the domestic to the historical, and personal experiences to ancestral narratives. Its materiality offers beautiful metaphors of human experiences. History is reconstructed from its fragments and its ability to endure time makes it an excellent repository for personal and collective memory. And with my woven work, I want to add another layer of complexity to that discourse. It allows me to think about the memories, knowledge, and cultural traditions that travel with people across generations.
Africans Column: Having been born in the Bahamas and having built a life between different geographies, how has distance from home influenced the way you think about Bahamian identity and the stories embedded within your work?
Anina Major: Living away from the Bahamas has made me more aware of what I carry with me. Distance creates space for reflection, allowing me to see myself not as fixed, but as something continually shaped through memory, movement, and lived experience. My work explores how home can be both a place and a feeling that travels with me.
Photography credit Andrew T. White | Copyright The Artist; Courtesy Larkin Durey.
Africans Column: Many of your sculptures draw from vernacular Caribbean forms, craft traditions, and material cultures. How do you balance preserving cultural memory with creating space for reinterpretation and transformation?
Anina Major: I’m interested in cultural traditions as living and evolving practices rather than fixed exercises. Drawing upon the vernacular of craft practices allows me to honor the knowledge and histories they carry, while also creating space to imagine new possibilities. Through material experimentation and shifts in scale, form, and context, I am able to explore how cultural memory can be preserved and remain open to transformation.
Africans Column: There is often a tension in your work between absence and presence, permanence and impermanence. Is this duality something you consciously pursue, and what does it reveal about the experience of migration?
Anina Major: Yes, I love this tension. Migration often involves holding multiple realities at once, presence and absence, belonging and displacement. You can be deeply connected to a place while physically distant from it, how absence and presence coexist, I am fascinated how materials, especially clay can embody those tensions.
Africans Column: The exhibition arrives at a moment when conversations around diaspora, movement, and belonging are increasingly central to contemporary art. How do you see your work contributing to these wider discussions?
Anina Major: Although my work is rooted in personal experiences, it is through those experiences, I seek to engage broader questions around understanding oneself through lived experiences, how that continues to shape us and recognizing the value in it.
Africans Column: Your work has entered major institutional collections and will soon be the subject of The Sacred Mangrove at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. How has your relationship to scale, audience, and ambition changed as your practice has grown internationally?
Anina Major: As my practice has grown, I’ve become more interested in how scale can shape a viewer’s physical and emotional experience. While the audience has expanded, my core interests remain the same. I love materiality as it relates to memory and belonging, but the opportunity to expand environmentally and to invite broader conversations across different cultural contexts is exciting. My ambition has grown towards creating sculptural experiences that engage people spatially, work that can operate at architectural scale while remaining grounded in the material language. And The Sacred Mangrove will be another push for my work with installation to sculptural ecosystems.
Africans Column: Looking ahead, what questions, materials, or ideas are currently occupying your attention, and where do you see your practice evolving in the coming years?
Anina Major: I’m increasingly interested in how sculpture can move beyond the individual object and shape a viewer’s experience of space. While my work remains grounded in clay and questions of memory, migration, and belonging, I’m thinking more about architecture, landscape, and the relationships that emerge between people and their environments. Looking ahead, I see my practice evolving toward larger, more immersive installations that invite audiences into a physical experience of these ideas while remaining rooted in the material language that has always guided my work.
Photography credit Andrew T. White | Copyright The Artist; Courtesy Larkin Durey.
Africans Column: The poem that inspired this exhibition speaks of the complicated act of returning home and questioning whether one still belongs. Have you found that art can become a form of home-making in itself—a place where multiple identities, histories, and geographies can coexist?
Anina Major: Absolutely. I’ve come to think of home less as a fixed place and more as an evolving relationship to memory, community, and belonging. Through making, I’m able to bring different histories, geographies, and experiences into conversation with one another, and in that sense the work itself becomes a space where those complexities can coexist.
At the heart of Tender Seedlings is an understanding that migration is rarely a story of simple departure and arrival. Instead, it is a continual process of carrying fragments of one place into another, preserving memories while adapting to new realities. Through clay, weaving, and vessel-making, Anina Major transforms deeply personal experiences into forms capable of speaking across cultures and geographies. Her sculptures become repositories of memory, preserving traces of family histories, cultural traditions, and emotional landscapes that might otherwise remain intangible.
As contemporary conversations around diaspora, identity, and belonging continue to shape artistic discourse globally, Major’s work offers an important perspective rooted in lived experience yet expansive enough to resonate far beyond the Caribbean. In Tender Seedlings, home is neither a destination nor a fixed geography. It is something carried, reconstructed, questioned, and remade. Through her practice, Major reminds us that belonging is not always about where we are from, but about the memories, traditions, and relationships that continue to travel with us wherever we go.
Image Courtesy:
Blair J Meadows & Andrew T. White
