Reap What You Sew, 2021-2022
Printed Tea-towel with ric-rac edge, 50cm x 71cm
I designed this piece Reap What You Sew last year in response to a brief set by the Horniman Museum and Gardens, in Forest Hill, SE London, which I had submitted to. The Museum is named after Frederick Horniman, who inherited his dads business Horniman Tea founded in 1826. The Museum opened by a different name in 1890 but reopened in 1901 as a purpose built museum. The collection is full of tea and coffee paraphernalia formed throughout the british empire. Unfortunately I didnt get the opportunity so the detailed complex work stayed in my ipad until I remembered it a year later. I had it printed on to a tea towel as I thought this was the most appropriate outcome for such an illustration. I share below the writing I submitted about how archives, galleries, objects and empire combine.
As a colonised person living in England with an interest in the Victorian era of innovation, collecting and exploring, i see the privilege that those people of wealth enjoyed while colonised people across the globe were worked to death. I wish i could travel, return to my mothers country of birth and collect amazing textile art from different places while i make art and learn about history. Instead I feel it is my duty to make art which decolonises our institutions and brings our stories to the forefront of them. There is a conflict which many of us face living in the UK, while our government prevents institutions and schools from having these important conversations about our shared history. Colonised people know the history of the British empire but most of the general public have purposely not been taught about it.
While Europeans were dictating that colonised people were savages in need of civilising, they were also stealing our scientific and technological knowledge which advanced their society.
I have a deep passion for the collection and protection of world textiles, much of which has been lost to the wear and tear of human life. As an embroidery artist and historian this history is at the core of my practice. Textiles tells the history of human activity, humans have been using a needle and thread for over 40,000 years.
This drawing encompasses my interest in Victorian life, needlework, collecting art and objects and the invention of greenhouses/wardian cases to preserve the natural history specimens being imported from across the globe.
The woman sits at home doing needlework, her back facing away from some of the hard truths displayed behind her. The labour, control, violence which was involved in creating all the components of her content “British” life including afternoon tea. Her dress showcases the history of empire. Global travel on ships, sugarcane and tea plants worked by enslaved and displaced people, the cutlass used for the hard labour involved in cutting cane, the creation of west India docks on the Thames which became the global tea exporter of the time. Textiles, tea and sugar were three of the major exports which made Britain rich, by plundering the textiles industry in India, enslaving African people for labour and spinning cotton picked by them in many British mills or stealing tea seeds from China and forcing them to trade.
The oil rig, flames outside the window and melting icebergs under her dress all reference the environmental issues which really started with colonialism and the onset of capitalism which contributes massively to our planets decline.
Our government are currently try to stop the important works surrounding decolonisation, which I believe is integral to the future of our country. The true history of Britain needs to be acknowledged and reflected across all institutions because the legacies of colonialism are seen everywhere within them, and to this day ex-colonies suffer from poverty and corruption caused by Britain and Imperialism.
My dream is to have access to many archives of institutions across Britain, to dissect the items within them and create art to tell stories which have been hidden away from the history books.
As a mixed race person I can see the disparity within my own lineages as far as accessing family information. I know my paternal family history because they had the privilege of time, education, wealth and travel which allowed them to explore their family history. My maternal family came from the poorest communities of India to work as labourers in the Caribbean, their history is oral and comes with so much trauma that much of it is left unsaid. They never had access to education and when they did it was under colonial rule which forced them to assimilate and see the mother country in glory. While beginning the journey of trying to find more information about my Maternal family history as Indentured labourers I soon realised how difficult it would be to access. The land owners, ship captains and people of note where categorised and labelled within Kew Archives, which means if your ancestor were involved in the Slave Trade you could easily trace your family history. Whereas colonised people must spend weeks searching through records.
My mum was born in Demerara, Guyana, an ex-british colony which was home to the first Indian Indentured labourers who worked the sugarcane plantations after The Slave Trade was abolished. Britain like to paint themselves as historically moral for abolishing the slave trade, but i personally know that they found cheap labour in India and other colonies, otherwise my family wouldn't have ended up in the South American country of Guyana on the Caribbean sea.
Despite being the origin of Demerara sugar, my country Guyana is not known on a global scale. When I learnt that the western invention of anaesthesia has origins with the Indigenous Guyanese people who use blow darts for hunting I was shocked. Or that John Edmonstone, an ex Enslaved African man from Demerara, Guyana taught Charles Darwin how to do taxidermy in the Amazon rainforest, which lead to him being able to prove his theory of evolution. How many more scientific discoveries have roots in Indigenous knowledge from across the globe?
Britain became rich through textiles and trading many different goods which they stole or used slave labour to cultivate and spread across the world. This included tea and sugar, close to both my heart and the rest of the countries as well as the core of the Horniman’s collection. Without the Victorian obsession with tea and cakes, sugar wouldn't have been worth the same as gold.