Parted, the Antilles Current…Meridian: 81 degrees West
Inspired by a line of Peter Matthiessen’s novel Far Tortuga, Ebanks uses his formal training with glasswork to explore his personal and cultural history, focusing on his family’s maritime heritage. He brings together a series of images — a turtle skull, map references, a fish skeleton, and wings of a Cayman Brac Tropic bird — in a fragmented, dreamlike manner to comment on the cycles of life and dependency. Antilles… featured in the artist’s solo exhibition Blue Meridian at NGCI in 2011, which was the culmination of two year’s work that translated the history and environment of his native home, Grand Cayman, into glass and porcelain.
About the Artist
Davin Ebanks
b. 1975
Born in Grand Cayman, Davin Ebanks acquired a BA in Graphic Design at Anderson University, Indiana, and an MFA in Glass Sculpture at Kent State University, Ohio. He has been artist-in-residence at Jacksonville University and Anderson University, and has taught at New York’s Urban Glass (the first and largest glass studio in the United States) at Kent State University and at Salisbury University. He won The McCoy Prize for Fine Craft in 2003 and NGCI’s 2012 Public Sculpture competition. Ebanks was one of four Caymanian artists to be recognized in A-Z of Caribbean Art (Robert & Christopher Publishers: 2019), a landmark survey of contemporary art from the Caribbean region and its diaspora. His work is included in the permanent collections of NGCI and the Cayman Islands National Museum, and has been displayed at the Glass Art Society’s Annual Conference and in numerous NGCI exhibitions, including: Blue Meridian (solo show, 2010–11), The Persistence of Memory (2011), Luminescent Forms (2014), tIDal Shift: Explorations of Identity in Contemporary Caymanian Art (2015), All Access (2015), Upon the Seas (2017), Revive: Contemporary Caymanian Craft (2017), Cross Currents – 1st Cayman Islands Biennial (2019), Saltwater in Their Veins (2020) and The People’s Collection: A 25-Year Cultural Legacy (2022).
