This collection of ceramic vessels is called Guaguas (2024) because I became a mother for the first time on the island of Lanzarote, and began to carry something inside my body whilst living within a very different landscape to my homeland of West Yorkshire.
The word guagua (pronounced wa-wa) is known to be used exclusively in The Canary Islands, situated off the northwest coast of Africa, and Cuba in the Caribbean. It means ‘bus’ and officially replaces the latin-derived autobus used in mainland Spain and other countries in the Spanish-speaking world. Since the Spanish colonisation of The Canary Islands from the 15th Century, these islands played a significant role in the Atlantic slave trade route, facilitating the colonisation of Africa, the Americas and beyond, throughout the centuries of expanding capitalism towards globalisation. During this time, there have been considerable migrations of Canarians to the Americas, usually due to drought, famine and volcanic eruptions, and migrations have been reciprocal from the Americas back across the Atlantic. This is believed to be the reason why Cuba and The Canary Islands use guagua, however, its etymology is still disputed. Here are some possible explanations:
Wagon (n) from Dutch wagen; cognate with Old English wægn ‘farm wagon’, meaning a vehicle in English; from Latin vehiculum, from veh(ere) ‘to carry, convey, ride’.
Awawa (v) ‘to move quickly’ in Ngu language, spoken by African slaves in Cuba.
Guagua (n) ‘baby’ or ‘little child’ in Quechuan language, spoken in South America.
Guagua (adv) for ‘little, for nothing, for free’, spoken in Cuba (children are not charged for riding buses).
Wa & Wa Co. Inc (Washington & Walton Company Incorporated), an American transport company which manufactured some of the first passenger carriers towards the mid-late 19th century in Cuba.
This journey - of becoming a migrating vessel - was the start of a continuous state of transformation, a slow unraveling and merging with an(other) which brought me to thinking very differently about landscape and caregiving. As I handle the clay like the flesh of the land, I am replicating or mirroring the process of attending to a baby or young child, experiencing the intimacy of touch and the continuous, cyclical nature of caregiving. Like pulsating, widening circles, as my children grow older we are slowly and gradually moving further away from each other, sometimes returning to intimacy, before orbiting out again into the world beyond the flesh. I see the clay as the space between our bodies, and how this intimacy can sometimes be pushed to its limits and collapse in destructive ways, before another space is created to catch the chaos or whatever the other might need next. Sometimes these spaces in the vessels can also speak about what isn’t there, what was lost, or what failed.
Some of the vessels are made from materials found in the post-industrial landscape where I raise my children, such as the clay from the fields near my home, and iron oxide that is extracted from water routinely pumped out of the (now disused) mine at the National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield.
If I create an aggregate by collapsing all the possible meanings of the word guagua, I find a deeper meaning pertaining to my maternal relationship with both the landscape of Lanzarote and my homeland, which I sense is made manifest in these clay vessels … the vehicle taking its traveller to who knows where … the wa-wa-wah feeling of moving my body across a landscape, as if by magic … the little baby carefully carried in my arms for nothing … because to care-give is to expect nothing in return … the corporate branding of a mode of transportation navigating a capitalist world built upon the exploitation of bodies and land as resources.
The collection of vessels and an artist book were presented together in Our Wider Flesh exhibition in July 2024 at Project Space, The School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies at The University of Leeds.
wa wa
wagon wheels
roll along
wallowing waves
marine lace
foam linger
indigo velvet thighs
deep dive
ride away
rightwaywrongway
wayward
leeward
leeway
waylay
windward
wind
fall
wilderness
wildflowers growing
seeds soil fingering
flowing
freefall
waterfall
downfall
downstream
stratascene
seam of coal
mine stream
steam train
chugging white whirling
floating island of carbon currents
enclosed carbon copy
take the trade winds
northeasterly
south
migratory
sub-tropic turning westerly
upwelling
swelling belly of sea-soaked pyre
atlantic gyre
atlantic slave trade
ships sinking
chains rattling
shipping lanes leaning into
laneway into estuary
estoy aqui
key stone
stepping
stone
brimstone
spilling
dry stone walls
bell tolls
coins from a wishing well
welcome
call of thunder
wall of water
water’s wake
waking baby
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh