Stories, Studios and the World’s Artists Build

By Christopher Tobutt

The final leg of the Cayman Art Week Art Bus Tour moves between North Side, East End, and George Town, tracing a path through four very different creative spaces. What links them is the way each artist turns ordinary materials, familiar landscapes, or private visions into something that speaks beyond itself — a reminder that art often tells the stories we don’t have words for. Cayman’s artists have always carried that quiet gift, a kind of hidden river running beneath the surface of everyday life.

Stop 8 — Kerwin Ebanks at Gram Bella’s

Although the exhibition Manavelins 4 has now concluded, Gram Bella’s in North Side remains shaped by the memory of it. The space — founded by curator KerriAnne Chisholm — has become one of Cayman’s most distinctive cultural hubs, a place where exhibitions, conversations, and community gatherings unfold inside an unfinished concrete structure that feels part studio, part shelter, part openair stage.

Kerwin Ebanks’ show lingered in the mind long after its closing date. Known for transforming shoreline debris into sculptural works, Ebanks created pieces that were both beautiful and unsettling. A mermaid’s hair became a cascade of washedup plastic combs. A sunset mosaic glowed with the colours of disposable lighters. A lifesize shark lay on the concrete floor, its body shaped from reclaimed netting. A frigate bird hung in midflight, its shadow sharp on the wall, its form built from tangled filaments gathered from the beach.

Even though the exhibition is no longer on view, its message remains: everything we discard has a story, and the coastline remembers all of it.

Stop 9 — Beam Reach Studio

Hidden in East End, Beam Reach Studio is a family space with a gentle, welcoming energy. Motheranddaughter artists Kathryn Lloyd and Dominique Michelle Lloyd present Rocking It, an exhibition full of colour and personality.

Dominique’s paintings lean toward the playful — stylised figures, bright shapes, and a sense of joy that feels almost musical. Kathryn’s work is quieter, more contemplative: landscapes, portraits, and a striking painting of the Cayman Brac Bluff that captures the island’s rugged calm.

Together, their work feels like two voices in conversation — one exuberant, one reflective — both celebrating the simple pleasure of making something that lifts the spirit.

Stop 10 — Palette to Palate at Indigo Bay

At Indigo Bay, the exhibition Palette to Palate brings together two artists who have spent many years observing Cayman’s natural world: Anne Butler McNerney and Michael Gustafson.

McNerney’s watercolours are delicate and precise, built on decades of careful draftsmanship. Her washes of colour feel almost weightless — seagrass drifting in clear water, the soft line of a coastal horizon, the quiet shimmer of light on the sea.

Gustafson’s dimensional photography offers a contrasting experience. His underwater scenes — divers, coral, rock formations — extend beyond the flat surface of the canvas, with textured elements that push outward like fragments of the seabed itself. It’s a tactile way of seeing the same environment McNerney paints, two interpretations of the same world: one soft and fluid, one sculptural and immersive.

Stop 11 — Mind’s Eye: The Home of Miss Lassie

The final stop is a place unlike any other: the home of Gladwyn “Miss Lassie” Bush, one of Cayman’s most beloved visionary artists. She began painting in her sixties, driven by vivid spiritual visions that arrived without warning. She saw Jesus standing over the sea behind her house. She saw angels. She saw scenes she felt compelled to record.

Miss Lassie painted on whatever surface was available — doors, walls, wood panels — covering her home with images that feel both intimate and otherworldly. Today, the Mind’s Eye centre preserves that environment, allowing visitors to step directly into the space where her visions first took shape.

Her work is not polished or academic. It is immediate, heartfelt, and profoundly human — a reminder that art can begin anywhere, at any age, and with any materials, as long as the need to express something is strong enough.

Closing Movement

These final stops reveal the breadth of Cayman’s artistic imagination: Ebanks’ environmental storytelling, the Lloyds’ shared creative dialogue, McNerney and Gustafson’s twin visions of the sea, and Miss Lassie’s luminous inner world. Together, they form a portrait of an island where art is not just decoration, but a way of seeing — and a way of remembering.