Rarely have I seen a more evocative and meaningful title for an exhibition than Better Would, currently on view at the Rick Fairies Gallery at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art. Curated by Jasmine Lee and featuring the work of Kimberly Fisher with Blair Raughley Masters and Ish Yakub Corday, the exhibition brings together cyanotype images, sculptures, poetry, and an immersive, constructed environment to examine care as a cyclical and communal act.

The title, spoken by a Bermudian matriarch, “Better would,” or “you’d better, love,” is a gentle imperative that conveys obligation and tenderness.

The phrase resonates throughout the exhibition, reinforcing the central theme: care as a ritual passed between generations, shaped by repetition, responsibility, and connections.

“Better would come”, “Better would be there.” Better would share your strength, your history, your warmth. These words whisper throughout the gallery.

The immersive aspect of the exhibition demands active engagement from the viewer, a risk that the artists bravely accepted.

The unorthodox installation uses sound, layered imagery, and spatial division to establish an environment that is intimate and communal at once.

Also daring is the emphasis on collaboration over individual authorship, which opened the artistic process to allow layers of expression to emerge.

Fisher’s installation plays a central role in this experience. Dividing curtains, lace tablecloths that hang laundry-style, create semi-transparent layers of space and define a path that guides the viewer through the gallery.

This path leads to intimate spaces, each housing a new cyanotype, photograph, collage, ceramic sculpture, or found object.

Fisher described these spaces as “rooms of the mind,” an apt metaphor for a space designed for personal reflection on care, healing, and obligation.

Collaboration is not merely the method, but the subject of the exhibition. The artists’ reliance on each other and their willingness to act selflessly allowed for improvisation and discussion to drive the process.

New ideas emerged collectively. Fisher, speaking at the artists’ talk on January 22 at Masterworks, described how including multiple perspectives caused ideas to pass through phases, and in the end, the images were able to “share what at the time we couldn’t explain”.

As one esteemed attendee to the event described it, “It doesn’t feel like three artists. It feels like one, unified voice.”

While the roles were intentionally blurred, the artists acknowledge their contributions.

Corday is a storyteller who collaborated with Fisher and Masters in bringing the narrative space to fruition.

She provided written prompts suggesting visuals, which Masters then photographed. Fisher created the cyanotypes and collages from these photographs and worked with Lee on the installation process.

The interaction of the artists was a metaphor, therefore, embodying the action of care and support.

With so many voices, confusion could easily obscure the artistic intent. Instead, the repetition of forms and techniques provides a cohesive experience.

All photographs were printed using the cyanotype process, known for its distinctive blue tones that render a peaceful, painterly effect.

Removed from the black-and-white certainty of the world, the images escape literalness and inhabit a dreamlike world, suspended in time.

Their softness and mystery beckon viewers to connect to their own sensations and memories.

Early in the exhibition path, As Above I depicts a veiled figure emerging from the water, the cloth both restricting and suffocating.

The veil echoes the lace tablecloths, illustrating how one material simultaneously provides differing sensations. While the curtains gently move in the gallery, the cloth becomes burdensome in the image.

At times, Fisher collaged images provided by Masters and Corday into new compositions, introducing colour into backgrounds, windows within larger forms, or silhouettes.

Her Like Whispers is found in one of the final “rooms.” Here, legs bathing in a basin are interrupted by bursts of colour, flowers floating in the water, suggesting release.

Again, water appears as an indicator of healing, necessary for the “alchemy” Fisher describes as crucial to the healing process.

Although softness is found throughout the exhibition, the artists remind the viewer that care is often painful.

Spiky objects and sharp-edged sculptures appear alongside the images, embodying the struggle inherent in the caring process.

Near one image, two thorny stalks hang, near another stands a basket of sharpened spikes. Overcoming these thorns is the aim of the exhibit.

Two ceramic pieces, Grip I and Grip II, provide the viewer with a sensory stronghold to sustain these sharp moments.

The shapeless ceramic pieces record finger impressions, conveying the reminder and importance of physical touch.

When grasped, one experiences the comfort that comes from the physicality of holding a hand. Touchingly, the artists reported that no matter the size of the hands, everyone who tried fitted the grip nicely.

The sense of the body, and not just its depiction, is central to the display of care and sustenance.

In Back Rooms III, the partial view of a female's back emerges from the darkened blues. The ridges of the spine are there, but the torso is incomplete, fractured.

Its amorphous shape thematically recalls the concept of care and evolution through the adjacent forms of landscape and ocean.

The body becomes fluid, even shifting outside the typical rectangular photographic format. As a whole, the forms suggest an organic process.

Jasmine Lee paired this image with With All Senses, a collage with layers of colour materialising underneath the entwined roots of a tree.

The foreground, cyanotype blue shapes are growing, echoing the spine of its neighbouring image and its similar vertical strength.

The vivid flowers in the background are coloured versions of the same forms in Back Rooms III. Also bridging the two works is the small ceramic piece Soft Girl, which anatomically suggests a spinal disc or a hip bone without literally depicting one.

The exhibition path ends on a curative spirit with the image Surround Me, which depicts an unfurled veil set against a Bermudian horizon.

Where earlier works show restraint or suffocation, this one suggests release, again mirroring the artists’ collaborative process.

Better Would draws on ritual, history, and collaboration to connect with the viewer in a deeply personal way. Through its layered spaces and collective process, it offers a meditation on care as a transformative act.

Better Would is showing at the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art until February 28