Between the Waters

Cy Gavin’s otherworldly paintings depict real sites and geological features of Bermuda, where his father’s family lived. Gavin has studied the island intently, drawing facts and myths about its slave life from archival research and oral histories. Formally, the paintings hint at Bermuda’s inhospitality to both plants and humans. Unable to sustain its own agriculture and having no Indigenous population, Bermuda relied heavily on the importation of goods and people, many of whom—like Gavin’s ancestors—were domestic and ship-building slaves. In The Future of Tucker’s Point, the artist imagines a time in which vegetation reclaims the luxury resorts built upon slave cemeteries and on the property of emancipated Black communities. Populating his landscapes with imagined portraits of relatives whose stories were written out of the public record, he points to themes of burial and erasure while making space for hope and renewal.