Statement:

These water tanks were created for a solo exhibition held at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands (NGCI) in June 2017. They are mixed-media containers that hold arrangements of ceramic portrait busts and artificial flowers suspended in water. The containers have lighting systems placed in their hoods, which allow the tanks to be viewed in lit and non-lit gallery settings. The tanks range from 10-gallon containers (56x30x30 cm) to 40-gallon containers (97x51x23 cm). 

The format of the water tanks resembles the design of traditional Caymanian gravestones that are shaped like little houses and can be found in the eastern districts of Grand Cayman. Those stones were created to symbolize house offerings for the spirits, and they also served the practical purpose of grave markers for the people buried in the sand below them. However, as time passed, the gravestones were displaced by tropical storms and other developments. They were moved from their original locations and the people they were supposed to identify were forgotten.  I found it interesting how these gravestones became structures that were important to identify a person but lost their specificity after being displaced by the tropical weather. The stones themselves now function as ghosts representing the presence of lost human spirits, and in this instance the human presence is adopted by a geometric sculpture.

With my tanks, I combine different ways to represent a human presence by placing figurative, ceramic sculptures and the geometric, house structures of the Caymanian gravestones together in a single unit. My tanks become further developed when they use water to submerge ceramic sculptures and artificial flowers together as installations for water burials.