Marine Salvage was an experimental exhibition held in Crate Gallery Margate in 2022, featuring both pre-existing and original artworks in conversation with historic documents, materials and stories connected to new research I had carried out as part of there Thames Estuary Sunken Slave Ships Project. It was produced by People Dem Collective and featured work by myself, artists James Jordan Johnson and Christiana Peake, People Dem Collective co-founder Victoria Barrow-Willams and Margate community members.
Shell Archive
Collaboration with Victoria Barrow-Williams of People Dem Collective and Margate Community Members
These shells belong to people in Margate of various Caribbean, African and Creole origins. They have been collected or inherited over lifetimes or generations.
Some were collected in Margate, some have travelled with us, or our elders, as links to places of origin. Here they have been ‘archived’ as objects that carry history and memory, transmitting textures, colours, sounds and stories of the ocean that shaped our pasts.
The shell that I contributed to this was found by my grandfather in the Seychelles and brought to the Kent coast when my family moved here in the 1970s. My grandparents at that time collected items and displayed them in a cabinet like the one used here, it was still in their house when I grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. I remember looking inside it to see things they’d brought with them on a journey through several countries to arrive in the UK, items sent by friends and relatives, souvenirs of London and the Isle of Wight and even Happy Meal toys ended up in there. It was one of the ways that we ‘archived’ our family history.
(Marine Salvage) Divination Set
Collaboration with Christina Peake
To develop this piece Christina and I had several discussions about the findings from my research on the Thames Estuary sunken slave ships. Within the research, Christina was especially moved by stories of mothers trying to protect their children in the hold, and the discovery of a collection of bones from the only existing excavated wreck in the North Sea. It’s thought that these bones might have been part of a talisman and we discussed the idea that they could have been smuggled onto the ship by an enslaved mother as an object of protection for her children.
The sculpture Christina created responds to ideas of multiple cultures and cosmologies being compounded, and the retention of knowledge, culture and ecologies as forms of protection and resistance. Christina imagined a salvaged divination set from the hold as something used by a new community striving to enable a single child to survive. The divination set is something that is passed around, with each person guarding a piece. Every evening the pieces are used to recount histories to the child who absorbs the knowledge held in all of them. Each piece has a different function – to map a place, to carry seeds or to reference a water deity.
Pamphlet for auction of goods made by enslaved people from St. Croix
Document found during my research at the Kent Archives
A pamphlet for auction of goods made by enslaved people from St. Croix, salvaged from the wreck of the Prince Frederic in Margate 1782.
Displayed upside down to follow the train of additions made as the pamphlet is used as scrap paper during the auction.
Coralised Vessel
Vessel found in the Indian Ocean, encrusted in coral.
From The Ship
The middle row of photographs shows three ancestors from the 19th century who arrived in the islands through different ship routes, as well as wording from surviving documentation about them.
Antrasiah was an indentured southern Indian contract labourer who was recruited by the British to work the island sugar cane fields.
‘Hilorie’ (real name unknown) was a 14 year old Makua girl who was trafficked by Arab traders and recaptured by the British anti-slaving squadron. They delivered her to the Seychelles where she became a forced plantation labourer.
Alfred Strous was an American whaler who deserted, by swimming, while his ship was anchored off the Seychelles.
They represent the Asian, African and European elements of the Indian Ocean Creole identity. The images surrounding them represent the merging of the three groups and conversion into memory in later generations.
