With the final bat to ball and wickets and overs to spare, CPL Cricket 2024 is over. For some, the closest they got to the Providence Stadium and how they enjoyed cricket season was with a bottom house, side-street, any-accommodating-green-space/open-space game of bat and ball. Poking ball or lashing for six with complete intention. For others, it was through a screen and glorious yelps – “Six!” “Out!” “He gone!” “He gone, gone, gone!” Anticipation – “dem boys gon do it!” Until, they didn’t! And for others, perhaps disinterested or unable to bear the emotional ride of the game – dashed hopes and quieted enthusiasm even in its shortened format, it was by way of a display of imaginatively transformed cricket bats in the art exhibition Bat and Ball.
Bat and Ball was a few months in the making beginning with a Call for Artists to transform simple bats and later a similar Call for Photographers was added. Both calls were open without restriction. As a consequence, the exhibition showcased responses from known and lesser-known artists. Perhaps some were students. Also, as a consequence of the open call, artists who may not have been invited, if participation was by invitation only, were able to participate. As a result, the responses to the call were eclectic and unpredictable. Not surprisingly, some artists evoked scenes of cricket: Uniformed cricketers at the crease; youth cricketers presumably in the Rupununi’s expansive space with an improvised wicket; a solitary youth standing beside a three-stump wicket, bat slung over the shoulder, ball in mid-air on a return to his hand.
Poignantly, another invoked history. The bat, an implement used in a game where boundaries must be protected, was used to evoke a real and one-sided game about boundaries. A game orchestrated by one team while the other is drawn into the foolery. The scale of justice shown in imbalance on the surface of the bat shared space with the words of Sir Shridath Ramphal concerning Vene-zuela’s territorial claims on Guyana. West Indian cricket was serious business and this particular bat evoked that complex history through engagement with this present.
As a fan of diminutively scaled paintings, it was exciting to see how artists responded to the reduced space of the bat and its shape. Many approached the bat from one side only, creating a work best displayed on a wall. Fewer responded to the three-dimensionality of the bat, transforming it into something that needed to be seen on both sides. Indeed, some responded to the reduced space so well that perhaps this more intimately sized format may better suit them. While a few bats became templates for additions to transform this implement of potential artful batsmanship into something sculptural, the bat by Aelisha Garnett-Williams stood out. Garnett-Williams carved into the surface of her bat creating a delightful scene of viewing cricket. She evoked nostalgia for the days when schoolboys climbed the trees around Bourda Ground to watch West Indian batsmen protect their wickets with finesse. Garnett-Williams not only carved into the bat accentuating illusions of space, but she also drew a convincing scene based on childhood memory, then built up the bat using leather and epoxy! If any respondent caught the spirit of cricket fever on their bat it was Garnett-Williams with this work. Paul Harris’s cartoon drawing of young boys playing bat and ball as the junior batsman dreams of graduating to CPL wonderfully complemented the joy and love of cricket captured by Garnett-Williams. Ohene Koama’s two bats evoked the merriment of the party mound and the tipples that may accompany the cries of “We win!” Koamo transformed the cricket bats into rum bottles. Without the tipple but with the cooling of a good puddle-creating rain, Michael Lam took us down memory lane to our days playing a hotly-contested game with relatives and friends. Lam’s high contrast black and white photograph Cricket in the Rain captures the tension. Lam’s photograph was one of three that complimented the discourses on cricket articulated on bats. Other bats were used as a surface to celebrate Guyana’s natural wonders – particularly Kaieteur Falls – and the fauna.
Is Bat and Ball a game? In her introduction to the exhibition so titled, Isabelle de Caires followed personal reflections on childhood bat and ball, with a reference to Ian McDonald’s Sunday column ‘Sport is not a game.’ de Caires wrote, “[McDonald] noted, not without irony, that as the stakes have risen, sport has lost a little of its soul, its humour, its joie de vivre. By contrast, bat and ball is the antithesis of modern professional cricket; the former as fluid and forgiving as the latter is rule-bound and ruthless.” Later, in furthering her thesis that bat and ball is not simply a game, de Caires wrote, “each game of bat and ball is a slice of something bigger, something infinitely greater, something that we can only enact in episodic morsels, repeatedly. Each episode of bat and ball is both epigram and epic, a part and the whole.”
Bat and Ball was an exciting exhibition. While it was challenging to read the labels and other text accompanying the exhibition and it was also difficult to correlate the work with artists, the exhibition was definitely worth visiting. Over 35 artists including two photographers displayed their work in what was also the inaugural exhibition of The Gallery at Moray House, which the press release said is “an occasional art gallery and exhibition space intended to complement Moray House Trust’s existing programme of cultural work.” Bat and Ball was curated by Dennis de Caires (see Eye on Art, 12 May 2024) and Trinidadian gallerist living in Guyana, Christina Grell. Elsewhere, in the exhibition, the paraphernalia, we are told that this gallery aims “to widen access and connect more people with art, to heighten awareness of and appreciation for the myriad forms of art practised locally – to make it more visible.” Lofty aims but noble, an exhibition that seeks to explore the one game every Guyanese must have played to truly say they had a Guyanese childhood was a good way to start.
The exhibition ran from Wednesday 25th September to Friday 4th October at Moray House Trust, Georgetown. Among the participating artists were art instructors Dawne Isaacs and Alyce Cameron; sculptors Stephen McKenzie and Aelisha Garnett Williams; cartoonist Paul Harris; mosaicist Lisa Thompson; and photographers Michael Lam and Nikhil Ramkarran. Bernadette Persaud made a surprising appearance with a piece I renamed the Nameless Batman.
