- Venue
- Walker
- Starts
- Friday, November 29, 2024
- Ends
- Sunday, March 2, 2025
- Address
- Liverpool
- Location
- North West England
- Organiser
- Walker Gallery
Stitching Souls: Threads of Silence is the culmination of my residency at the Walker Gallery and participation in the 20/20 Decolonising the Arts project. I focused on their portrait collection. The collection consists of grand formal portraits of Liverpool’s aristocrats showcasing their wealth and power. My installation interrogates these merchants’ representation and obscured histories of exploitation and inhumanity from which they accumulated wealth and prestigious positions in Liverpool. Through my work, I seek to weave together these silenced histories, the materials of oppression, and the power of cultural memory, challenging our understanding of the legacies of slavery and colonialism.
The Zong Massacre of 1781 was a pivotal incident in the history of the abolition of slavery and is closely connected to some of the portraitures in the Gallery’s collection. The Zong was a ship, overloaded with enslaved people, transporting them in horrendous conditions from the coast of Africa to Jamaica. The barbaric incident occurred when a navigational error was made, depleting its stores of water. To save the remaining crew, the Captain, Luke Collingwood, ordered his crew to murder 133 people by throwing them off the boat as a ‘matter of necessity’. The ship’s owners later claimed insurance for the loss of their cargo at sea.
“Stitching Souls” honours and memorialises the 133 Africans who were killed on that day. One survived.
At the heart of the installation are 132 quilted heads, each carefully crafted using materials chosen to reflect the African tribes and ethnicities of those enslaved and transported across the Atlantic. The heads are initially wrapped in cotton wadding in a process that mimics mummification, preparing them for their metaphorical ancestral journey back to Africa; they are then stitched exclusively with cotton African textiles, an act that connects the victims to their ancestral heritage. Using cotton is deliberate and connects the cotton trade to its production using enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the American South to the rapid burgeoning of Liverpool’s wealth. This material choice highlights the intertwined histories of labour, exploitation, and profit that enabled the grandeur of cities like Liverpool.
Quilting, central to this process, is deeply rooted in African American culture and carries the legacy of storytelling and healing. Each stitch represents a deliberate and thoughtful effort to mend the wounds of history. Adorning the heads with cowrie shells adds another layer of significance. Once used as currency and symbols of wealth in African traditions, cowrie shells here take on a spiritual meaning, preparing the souls for their journey back to their ancestors. The spirit guides at the front of the installation are made from mud cloth, a material deeply connected to African storytelling and ancestral protection. They will lead the souls’ home, embodying resistance, remembrance, and a spiritual passage to the afterlife.
The installation juxtaposes these carefully quilted heads with grand gold-framed replicas of merchant portraits and empty gilded frames. The towering replica portraits exude power and self-importance, reflecting the wealth and grandeur these men sought to immortalise. Yet the true nature of how their wealth was built on the suffering and exploitation of enslaved Africans has been obscured and ignored in historical narratives. The replicas highlight the layers of contradiction and hypocrisy inherent in their public personas. The decision to include empty frames alongside these portraits symbolises the silences and absences in these narratives. They reflect the inaccessibility of these merchants, their presence confined to spaces that still celebrate their success while hiding the truth of their origins. The silences mirrored here in these empty frames challenge the viewers to question the narratives we preserve and those we overlook.
“Stitching Souls: Threads of Silence” is an installation that honours and memorialises the lives lost as well as an act of reclamation and justice. It invites viewers to reckon with the legacies of slavery and those who profited from it. By honouring the victims, this work seeks to reweave the threads of history into a more truthful narrative, transforming this work of art into a vessel of healing, reminding us that the stories of the past remain stitched into the fabric of our present.
