In her second solo exhibition with TERN, SOON COME HOME, Bahamian artist Anina Major presents a new body of work that expands her exploration of memory, migration, and material culture through sculptural environments.
Inspired by Caribbean author Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, the exhibition asks, "what does it mean to find one's way home?" Rather than imagining home as a fixed geography, Major considers it an ongoing practice of remembering, repairing, and remaking - a spiritual return to wholeness through ancestral roots.
Over the past decade, Major has emerged as one of the most compelling voices working at the intersection of ceramics, sculpture, and installation. Hand-weaving clay to resemble palm-leaf plaiting, she draws on the basketry traditions of Bahamian craft learned from her grandmother, transforming techniques often commodified within the tourism economy. Using her own clay recipe and an atmospheric firing process, she incorporates shells, sand, sea glass, and found objects into the kiln, where they warp textures and alter glazes. Her ambitious sculptural works embody cultural knowledge while referencing tropical ecologies and both historical and contemporary ethnographies.
In SOON COME HOME , working across ceramic, glass, found objects, and neon, Major transforms the gallery into a living archive where ancestral knowledge is carried through material, architecture, and symbolic form. T he exhibition examines how labor, care, and craft preserve cultural memory while creating new possibilities for the future. Navigation emerges as a metaphor for identity and belonging. Works such as I Am Altering My Course to Port appropriate the language of international maritime signal codes to suggest that home is not a destination , but something continually negotiated. Outside the gallery, the neon work (NO) VACANCY challenges idealized visions of the Caribbean, questioning who belongs, who is displaced, and how ideas of paradise are constructed.
SOON COME HOME will remain on view until Oct 26, 2026. For more information on this exhibition, email info@terngallery.com
Anina Major
Anina Major is a visual artist from The Bahamas whose work investigates the relationships between self and place as a way of cultivating moments of reflection and a sense of belonging. 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.