This review is the promised sequel to my first review of the Bermuda Biennial exhibition at the Bermuda National Gallery.

The visual arts are typically divided into the fine and applied arts, the boundaries of which are often somewhat blurred. Art is often used in the service of religion, politics, protest, advertising, illustration, social commentary and so much more.

The art of Jayde Gibbons is one example of art as social commentary. The subjects of her concern is the disrespect of turning a slave cemetery into a parking lot at the rubber tree in Warwick and the even larger concern regarding the expropriation of the Tucker’s Town community, including their cemetery in the early 1920s, to create an exclusive resort.

Gibbons’ contribution is based on an interview with the late broadcaster, Oda “Blondelle” Mallory and her radio show, Living Memories.

All art is to some degree conceptual, but in recent decades this usually underlying aspect of art has been made front and centre in what is now known as conceptual art. In making the concept paramount, the visual aspects of the so-called visual arts is diminished and sometimes eliminated.

The contribution of Charlie Godet Thomas to the 2024 BNG Bermuda Biennial is an example of conceptual art, in that in order for the work to have any significance, its concept must be of top consideration.

Godet Thomas is a maker of puzzles as is seen in his All the Words for Goodbye. Surmounting the work is a rear view mirror, which provokes the question, goodbye to what or who? Underlying the mirror are bundles of paper or card slips, but after careful viewing, I could see no evidence of writing or words.

Godet Thomas’s other Biennial contribution, A Shelter, recalls the thinking of the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, especially in regard to his concept dwelling, which suggests something more than architecture. It’s more a sense of settlement, contentment. This corresponds with Godet Thomas’s subtitle, Home Sweet Home inside your Head.

The black-and-white photography of Teresa Kirby Smith is enigmatic. She says since last spring, she has been concentrating on photographing the Bermuda shoreline. Using a medium-format black-and-white camera, her Biennial photograph of Bermuda rocks is perceived as texturally abrasive. In its midst, however, is Dark Hollow. Is this an entrance to a sea cave? Its depth appears infinite. Therein lies a mystery, hence the title.

John Legere is one versatile artist. In a recent Bermuda Biennial, he exhibited colourfully painted mooring floats, exhibited in a pond in Tom Moore’s Jungle. In the current Bermuda Biennial, he is exhibiting 12 Guardian Jugs.

But what is a guardian jug? I am uncertain as to the origin of the term, but Legere’s jugs are boldly colourful and are a distant cousin of a toby jug. He claims that they are a Bermudian version of a face jug.

There are four families of jugs; each being determined by the shape or symbol of each mouth. The balancers have an + sign for a mouth. The breathers have an oval mouth. The defenders bare their teeth and the silencers have an X symbol for a mouth.

Until the 19th century, we in Bermuda expressed our aesthetics mostly though either architecture or the crafts. The craft arts were somewhat dependent on the availability of suitable local materials, such as palmetto weaving or platting, and other fibre arts, Bermuda cedar and other local woods for furniture making, construction or the making of boats. Local silversmiths got silver from shipwrecks.

Gail Marirea’s quilt-cum-realistic picture is a hybrid, in that she employs a craft art technique to produce a fine art landscape that is possibly by the Tucker sisters. What I don’t know is how the image was transferred to the quilted fabric, but that is not a necessary requirement in order to appreciate the work.

In an exhibition that is dominated by abstract and modernist aesthetics, its important to recognise that realism has been a vital aspect of Western art and it still is.

Zachary Stelios Marshall’s contribution to the Bermuda Biennial is a mystery in that the artist depicts his interest in the distant past but expresses that interest by modern means.

Marshall’s painting, Orion’s Gate, pictures a horse standing in front of what appears to be a gate made of the trunks of small trees. Within this wooden grid-cum-gate can be seen Orion’s three-star belt. In the exhibition’s catalogue, he rewrites of his interest in past histories, including the domestication of animals. I recall that there is evidence that horses were domesticated as early as Palaeolithic times. This is the first time that Marshall has exhibited in the BNG Bermuda Biennial.

• Part three of Charles Zuill’s Bermuda Biennial review will be published in Lifestyle next Saturday