VISUALISING the Caribbean on a dreich Saturday afternoon in Glasgow takes a leap of imagination in anyone's book.

The difference between Scotland and the collection of 700 different sun-drenched islands, islets, reefs and caves which make up the Caribbean is as vast as the Gulf of Mexico. But then people are people wherever you go. They have the same hopes and fears and the same burning desire to understand the world around them.

The day before I visited Transmission Gallery's Caribbean Queer Visualities exhibition, I heard Jamaican poet Tanya Shirley on a programme called Writing a New Caribbean on BBC Radio 4. Speaking in her melodic Jamaican cadences, she said artists and writers in the region were affected by what she called, "the brazenness of the sun and the heat" of the Caribbean.

As I gazed in Transmission's picture window from the other side of King Street, I felt a little of this heat in my damp winter-ravaged bones. The trigger was a sea of festive rainbow coloured garlands strung from the ceiling under a gaggle of large white glistening balloons.

Inside this small gallery space, I found the multi-hued garlands are made up of laser cut words. This installation is the work of Haitian-born Jean-Ulrica Désert and is titled Neue mittatis margaritas Vestries ante porcos (Do Not Cast pearls Before Swine).

It's joyful yet unsettling work which, in this silent gallery setting, gives off a distinctly melancholic admonishing air. The porcine biblical text is from Matthew 7:6. Later, trying to warm up with a bowl of soup in a nearby cafe, I read Désert's description of the work in the exhibition catalogue as being the marking of a "celebratory-space".

"Unlike the Latin title," he writes, "the garlands are in Creole languages of inflections".

He continues: "The artwork's cited text doesn't overtly refer to activities associated per se as gay/homosexual/queer, as Leviticus 18:22 [Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination] is too often interpreted to be doing."

Caribbean Queer Visualities has been curated by Small Axe, a cultural organisation based in the Caribbean, in partnership with the British Council. The exhibition was shown at the end of last year at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast as part of the 10th annual Outburst Queer Arts Festival.

If you can wade your way through the dense thickets of art speak in the accompanying notes, the aim of the exhibition is simple. In the last two decades, there has been a sea-change in the ways in which a new generation of Caribbean artists have started to portray their culture. How is that new generation or artists – many of whom are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) – defining their world?

In a way, all art is always about "otherness" or "queerness"; an attempt to give a visual voice to the worlds in which we find ourselves living, be the worlds drenched by the brazenness of the sun or not.

What struck me about the text in the catalogue, which includes statements by the ten visual artists involved in the exhibition, is the fact that several, including Désert, state that their "queerness" was not a state which they cared to label themselves. At the same time, most acknowledge it defines their work.

Richard Fung, an artist who uses photography as his medium, is based between Trinidad and Canada. He writes in his refreshingly straightforward artist statement that: "There is a way in which we use the term queer to apply to anything that unsettles or disrupts, and I'd like to say a place like Trinidad is already quite a queer space, right? So [queer] is reacting against the notion of normativity. What's the norm in a a place like Trinidad?"

When you're not asking the question: "When did normativity become A Thing," you could ask that question of any culture anywhere in the world in in 2017. One of the most compelling pieces in the exhibition is by Bahamas-based Kareem Mortimer. His film, Witness, is a potent portrayal of a group of transgender women and drag queens, who talk directly to camera in front of a mirror as they put their make-up on.

Just seven-minutes long, I learned a lot about what it feels like to be in a state of "otherness" in the Caribbean. For these woman, the process of transforming themselves using the armour of make-up and clothes is part of who they are. "Angel", a 29-year-old pre-op transgender woman talks matter-of-factly about the logistics of her job as a street worker and how she often dupes heterosexual men into thinking she has a vagina.

I found myself thinking about Angel for days afterwards. Mortimer shot the film in 2008 so what is Angel like as she nears 40, I wonder. What has changed?

Change – and the process of change – is the crux of this exhibition. Like all disparate cultures, the times we live in are forcing artists in the Caribbean to think globally. Gender has never been more fluid; just like time is fluid. Time flies, no matter whether you live with a warm wind under a brazen Caribbean sky or soft smirr on a Scottish Saturday afternoon.

Caribbean Queer Visualities, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow until March 25.

www.transmissiongallery.org