Artist Anina Major Is Recontextualizing the Bahamian Narrative One Clay Plait at a Time
As a kid growing up in the Bahamas, Anina Major watched from under the dining room table as her grandmother’s feet stepped on the sewing machine pedal, connecting woven plait strips. Other women visited to learn about weaving from Major’s grandmother. “Even though she might not have been transferring that knowledge to me directly, I was still indirectly receiving it,” Major told Observer.
Today, Major preserves that history and her family lineage by taking inspiration from the objects her grandmother made and sold at the straw market. Her striking ceramic works use the same techniques her grandmother taught: her woven sculptures are made from strips of clay plaited as if they were straw. These works are dichotomous, both intricate and delicate yet durable and seemingly pliable, and her practice is similar in that it has its roots in nostalgia while pushing an art form into the future.
Not long ago, high-end contemporary design gallery The Future Perfect selected Major as the inaugural recipient of The Future Perfect Prize, which comes with $20,000 of unrestricted funding, professional development and mentorship and an exhibition at The Future Perfect’s New York City location. Major sees it as not just a win for her but for the artists and artisans who preceded her. “I didn’t really come up with this on my own; it’s a series of people and a community,” she said, adding that the honor is “saying to the community that you’re seen.”
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Major’s journey with ceramic weaving began unexpectedly when a friend invited her to a community pottery class. Working with clay brought a sense of comfort—at first, a hobby, then a calling. What started as casual curiosity soon deepened into a committed pursuit: she enrolled in the ceramics MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design to better understand what kind of maker she wanted to become. That exploration led her back to her grandmother and to the summers she spent watching her craft souvenirs, baskets, hats, dolls and bags for the Bahamian tourist market. “That’s how I understood how something becomes three-dimensional,” she said.
At R.I.S.D., Major devoted herself to the challenge of learning how to weave with clay. As she retaught herself the mechanics of weaving, she also revisited the tactile memories of watching her grandmother work—memories that lingered long after her grandmother’s passing when Major was just 13. Translating the flexibility of straw into the rigidity of clay required relentless experimentation. She spent several years studying the material’s chemical properties, seeking a way for clay to move with the pliability of palm. She began by rolling slabs into thin strips, mirroring the technique Bahamian women use to harvest and prepare palm. Once she succeeded in creating two-dimensional woven surfaces, she kept pushing, determined to bring the work into three dimensions.
“I think I could have ended there, but I was really pushing for something that could hold that occupied space; it just wasn’t enough,” Major said. She initially experimented with molds that mimicked the appearance of woven forms, but they felt insufficient—mere illusions that failed to honor the labor and precision of the women in the Bahamas who plait by hand. Determined to capture the authenticity of the process, she kept refining her technique, drawing unexpected inspiration from beach balls, monuments and the imagery found on Bahamian postcards. As her ceramic sculptures began to take shape and hold their own structure, she arrived at what she calls a “peekaboo”—vessels with intentional openings that expose the actual weave, making clear that what appears woven truly is. There’s no trickery, no facsimile—only the evidence of her hand. “A big part of my practice is about dispelling some of these illusions of being from the Caribbean—these illusions of fabricating some kind of image. I want to get more down into the grit.”
Today, Major’s creative practice is grounded in a deep commitment to preserving Bahamian culture and the artisanal traditions it spawned. In a country where tourism drives 50 percent of the gross domestic product, her grandmother wove and sold crafts at local markets to help fund her daughters’ education so they could build a new future. As Major tried to understand her ancestry through the act of weaving, she found herself reckoning with the layered meanings of these handmade objects—charming to visitors but complex for those who make them. The very artifacts that helped shape her identity were also bound up in the realities of the service economy, making it impossible to separate cultural preservation from economic context.
“I feel like my ability to adopt that practice and take it to other dimensions within my creative career speaks to the impact that it could make,” Major said. “It’s weaving great symbolism when we talk about resourcefulness and resilience.” She sees her current series of ceramic sculptures as just the beginning—an evolving practice through which she continues to explore, question and understand her own story. “Anina is really tapping into the spirit and essence of who she is as a person through her work,” The Future Perfect founder David Alhadeff told Observer.
Looking ahead, Major wants to explore woven sculpture as a form of performance, treating the act of making as a dance—a physical, intuitive process that can be another form of ancestral excavation. Once, she said, there were more than sixty distinct weaving styles in the Bahamas; today, only a few remain. “The making of this work is, in so many ways, a beautiful way of processing loss. Not just a loss of a person but also the evolution of an identity.”
Weaving, as traditionally practiced, is often an ephemeral form—straw and palm decompose, leaving little behind. By translating those materials into clay, Major gives permanence to an impermanent craft, preserving its intricacies in a medium that endures. Her grandmother never called herself an artist, but to Major, she unquestionably was. “It’s beautiful to think about how I can recontextualize the work of these women and add another layer of understanding: it is a work of art,” Major concluded.