Nadia Huggins, capturing light in water
Last autumn I visited the NOW Gallery, North Greenwich, to come across with who is now one of my favourite photographers. The show was entitled Human Stories: Circa No Future by the beautiful Nadia Huggins and curated by Kaia Charles. Nadia Huggins was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and now resides in St Vincent and the Grenadines. She is a self-taught artist mainly focusing her practice on photography. This exhibition was tackling the question of gender in the West Indies through the representation of young boys diving into the sea. This is a recurrent subject in Huggin’s work, being a queer woman living and working in the Caribbean.
In her work, the sea is pictured like the human mind and the surface presented like a frontier from under water. In any ways, we behave differently below this frontier and more naturally. In Circa No Future, this concept is represented through the masculinity of male teenagers. She shows us a group of boys who have a certain behaviour when interacting with one another but let the water guide their instinctual gestures under water. Nadia Huggins captures grace and fluidity in these moments of letting go: an attempt to break the traditional Caribbean ideas of manhood. There is a relationship between the human mind and the sea, but also a physical relationship that links human beings to the #environment. Huggins has been photographing the #flora of the island for about 2 years and noticed the impact of human beings on the environment.
In her latest project called Transformation, she mixes the quest for #identity and understanding of our impact on marine ecosystem by representing her portrait mixed with natural element from under the sea (last picture). Nadia Huggins’ work captures the beautiful curves of nature especially under water which she uses as another tool, a ‘second lens’. She stages how powerful nature can be and how we are affected by it in a way that it can help us reveal some parts of our personality.
