Talented Bermudian Artisans with a Focus on Sustainability
Susan Brown | Eyes on Scotland
The hardest part of being asked to write about artisans or makers for Guide Collective’s November 2021 theme is trying to whittle it down to just a few! Walking around my house looking at the art on the walls and looking at those I follow on Instagram, I knew this would be a hard task.
Rather than try and squeeze all my favourite artists and makers into one article, I’m going to feed you a few shorter articles over the month. The artists and artisans I have chosen are ones that are accessible to most budgets and are, for the most part, locally or nationally known, with a few breaking through quietly onto the international stage.
I’ll start close to home with my Bermudian partner, Alex Davidson. He is what I would call a typical islander, able to turn his hand to pretty much anything practical, and if he can’t find the part for a specific job or machine on the island or can’t wait for it to ship in from overseas, he makes it himself! He is like many artisans across the world–great at making beautiful items at his own pace but doesn’t enjoy the whole marketing and commercial side of things. He tends to work through a local agent who can do that for him.
The man and his workshop
Image | Susan Brown
He works full time in fisheries protection for the government and makes beautiful hand-carved spoons, butter knives, bowls and other wooden items in his spare time.
Living on an island means that local raw materials are finite, and part of Alex’s ethos is to reuse and repurpose discarded wood, whether it be windfall, landscaping waste, ocean flotsam and jetsam or off-cut wood. As such, he has a growing stockpile of various shapes and sizes of Bermuda cedar logs, spicewood (allspice or pimento wood), mahogany, Surinam cherry, cypress, purpleheart, and bits of teak that washed up on the shoreline from old boats. He has also started stockpiling Brazilian ipe decking offcuts, and I am looking forward to the small cocktail chopping boards and cheese boards he is planning to make from them.
Alex is currently reorganising the workshop so that he can focus on producing his beautiful wooden items in 2022. You can follow his craftwork on Instagram @alexdavidsonwoodcraft .
Not to be outdone, Chris Cabral, Alex’s co-worker with the fisheries protection also creates beautiful items using rope. He too believes in sustainability wherever possible and repurposes discarded ropes that he finds in the ocean as well as working with new ropes.
Having spent most of his life working on, in, and around the ocean, Chris has become an expert hand at intricate knots and ropework. It started in his early twenties when he was working on yachts that required some decorative ropework design for mooring bridles and rope fenders. Now being land based, Chris has had more time to investigate the different kinds of knots to use and items he can make from rope.
He currently sells through Gardner Gallery in Bermuda, which you can find on Instagram as @gardnergallerybermuda .
Both of these craftsmen will take commissions, so please contact them if you would like something custom made.
There are of course many more makers and artists in Bermuda that you could and should look into—a perfect excuse for a vacation there!
If you’d like to learn more about Bermuda or would like to consider it for your future travels, keep an eye on my @eyesonbermuda profiles on Instagram and Facebook.
