Atlantic Voices, the new exhibit curated by Lisa Howie at the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, opens an artistic dialogue between artists with a shared Atlantic experience.

The exhibition features three Bermudian artists, two Bahamian artists, and one from the Azores. Together, the works demonstrate visual and thematic connections while differing significantly in technical approach.

Howie, founder and creative director of Black Pony Gallery, has made it her mission to bring these voices to a wider audience. The artists exhibited at the Rick Faries Gallery are among those she’s featured at art fairs around the globe.

“Atlantic Voices has allowed me to curate a visual dialogue about shared experiences in the Atlantic world,” Howie said. “The artworks communicate with each other as though each artist was aware of the other's works, but it's through my lens that the dialogue is created.”

The six artists featured at Masterworks each speak to a linked worldview, exploring the light, colour, and structure that make up the mid-Atlantic visual array, while using distinct artistic methods.

The Bermuda contingent includes well-known figures Charles Zuill, Abi Box, and Meredith Andrews. Each finds visual inspiration in island forms.

Zuill, whose silverpoint drawings were the subject of a 2025 Masterworks exhibit, confirms his protean sensibility by featuring a group of drawings with yet another new approach. In the current work, he used a copper stylus on a cobalt blue surface, building subtle variations in tone. The depth of blue recalls oceanic imagery, but the geometric forms recall architectural edges and shifting light.

The poetic potential of place also drives Abi Box’s compositions, which are based on fleeting Bermudian moments. Her fluid handling of colour makes these scenes of island flora feel intuitive and intimate. They are less descriptive and yield a more personal response.

Both Box and Zuill spoke about their work on October 15 in the Masterworks gallery, where both artists described the importance of place in their work. Zuill referenced art historian Herbert Read, who “stressed the importance of place in the process of creation”. Box likewise described her concentration on Bermuda in her work, which, for her, counteracts the overwhelming scope of an increasingly global context.

Place and memory also shape the work of Azorean artist Leonor Almeida Pereira, whose Memory of a Place II is one of two works by her on view. Working with acrylic on canvas, Pereira layers shape and colour to suggest rather than describe. Softly focused and atmospheric, her paintings filter landscape through nostalgia and personal vision.

Bahamian imagery is represented by artist Sue Katz and her collages, which convey the chromatic patterns of textiles, stonework, and basketry in her surroundings. She layers patterns created using hand-painted and hand-printed paper with fragments clipped from tourist pamphlets. Among the artists on view, Katz is the only one to directly reference tourism, another common experience of the represented islands.

While Bahamian artist Jason A Bennett also employs collage, texture factors prominently in his compositions. He prepares his surfaces with found materials, including maps, introduces paint, then sands down the surface to expose layers beneath. The resulting tactile surface evokes coral or shorelines, adding a geological level to the final compositions.

A similar geological current runs through Meredith Andrews’s photographs, which she staged in the Bermudian landscape. Well-known locally for her nature and portrait photographs at LF Wade International Airport, she scavenges objects washed up on Bermuda’s shores, organises them chromatically, and photographs them installed in the landscape.

The photographs on view at Masterworks belong to her series Unnatural History. In these images, she ironically captures the colour associated with the Atlantic island landscape through inorganic ocean plastics, reminding viewers of the fragility of the marine environment.

In Lithified and Terrace, objects are embedded in the rocks as if they cling to them for survival. In Alluvium and Strata, vivid and orchestrated colours of the plastic debris snake along the shore, placed in relation to an encroaching tide.

Together, the works on view in Atlantic Voices centres on the commonalities of Atlantic visual experience. Connections weave between the works, even when the imagery and technique differ significantly, whether in Zuill’s tonal surfaces, Pereira’s atmospheric shapes, or Bennett’s weathered surfaces.

“This is the pleasure of my work,” Howie describes. “To be able to curate these visual experiences from islands near and far.”

• Atlantic Voices is on view in the Rick Faries Gallery at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art until December 5