Taking inspiration from portraits of merchants across the Walker’s collection, Karen McLean explores the legacy of the slave trade, and emphasises the scale of the atrocity both in terms of history, and how archive is presented.
The installation memorialises the 132 enslaved African people who were thrown into the sea in the 1781 Zong Massacre. They were murdered becuase, the crew claimed, there were water shortages.
Each human life was claimed as cargo on a later insurance claim by James Gregson, on behalf of the Liverpool-based William Gregson slave-trading syndicate who owned the ship. The victims’ identities are unknown.
132 heads, made from quilted African fabrics represent the lives lost. An additional head represents the strength of all enslaved people in their ability to build a legacy, families, and survive one of humanity’s most inhumane eras.
Working with a group of sewers in Birmingham, Karen McKlean created each head as a unique representation of a life. Quilting is used as a powerful story telling tool, reflecting its traditional uses, and offering a celebration of the strong visual culture retained and practiced today by Global Majority communities who have moved and been moved across the globe.
The Walker and National Museums Liverpool have been developing strategies for curating racist objects. Karen McLean shows them that you can share histories without showing them at all.
You don’t need to acknowledge or humanise the names behind the massacres in order to present the more important piece of the history; the lives and communities they destroyed.
Just because victims of slavery, and the Zong Massacre are anonymous doesn’t mean we can’t understand and feel their suffering. It’s more powerful to offer them representation through work like Stitching Souls than to present the perpetrators.
In an interview before the exhibition launch, Karen McLean explained:
“The gallery’s collection consists of grand formal portraits of Liverpool’s aristocrats showcasing their wealth and power – I have responded by creating a work that will transform abstract historical data into a tangible narrative that will redress historical erasure and silence.”
It does exactly that. It’s a genuinely tangible representation of what 132 lives, and their potential cultural identity looked like.
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Stitching Souls Threads of Silence is open at Walker Art Gallery until 2nd March 2025
Words Patrick Kirk-Smith