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Cera-Tan
Cera-Tan is a multidisciplinary Cayman-based South African artist whose practice interweaves fine art, storytelling and textile traditions. A self-taught artist, she has exhibited widely, including the 3rd Cayman Islands Biennial at the National Gallery. She explains, “When I create, I am not just finding a face to draw. I am diving into a person’s culture. The more I learn about the culture, the more I learn about myself” (Cera-Tan Kennaird, in Delving into her true creative power – A conversation with artist Cera-Tan, isybdesign.com).
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Cera-Tan’s work fuses realism with vibrant pattern, embroidery, and fabric – mediums often historically linked to craft and domesticity, and too often dismissed for their gendered roots. Through portraiture, she elevates these traditions, honoring her subjects as vessels of memory, resilience, and joy. Using mixed media and textile techniques, she challenges boundaries between art and inheritance.
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Her incorporation of embroidered, sewn, and hanging textile elements restores dignity and value to the intimate, skilled work of women’s hands. At the same time, it celebrates fabric and stitch as visual languages in their own right. Within the context of Circles of Time, Cera-Tan’s portraits become quiet but powerful acts of reclamation – turning cloth into living archives of identity and kinship.
CIRCLES OF TIME ARTWORK
Rooted In Diversity
Ink, Acrylic and Fabric on Canvas
40 in x 41 in
Fabric by Isy B. Design
Fabric name: Adara and the Cheetah
This compelling work was created for the 3rd Biennial at the National Gallery exhibition Conversations From the Past - In the Present Tense. Exploring ancestry and cultural roots in contemporary Caymanian life, Cera-Tan presents a portrait set against a textile print by award-winning fashion designer Isy B., Adara and the Cheetah, inspired by an original folktale. Kennaird explains of the piece, “It is a vibration of the friendship that was formed during the creation of this artwork.”
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Here, embroidery is not merely decorative or embellishment. It is a testament to care and agency. Kennaird reclaims the stitch as a form of authorship and the thread as a line that binds generations. The subject, smiling and radiant, emerges from a field of bold florals, surrounded by vibrant foliage and the suggestion of home. Her grayscale portrait contrasts sharply with the world of color behind her. Fine sewn details add texture and tactility, honoring not only the subject’s joy but also the unseen labor and care of those who stitch beauty into the everyday.
Introspection
Ink, Acrylic and Fabric on Canvas
45 in x 44 in
Fabric by Isy B. Design
Fabric name: Dance
In this tendered and layered portrait, the subject’s downward gaze evokes a moment of introspection and ancestry memory. Her skin becomes a canvas for light, shadow and inherited story, overlaid with fluid color and crowned with a delicate pink flower. A length of hand-sewn fabric flows off the canvas, extending the painted pattern into real space and blurring the boundary between image and object.
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This gesture is not merely decorative. It is a bridge between past and present. By incorporating fabric arts often relegated to the domestic sphere, Cera-Tan reclaims sewing as a form of generational knowledge, passed between women and embedded with meaning. The thread, quite literally, becomes a line of continuity, stitching the subject into longer lineage. Her work honors the tactile labor of care and memory, reminding us that what is made by hand carries stories too.