The Santiago Cross/ Trade Ship - Blessed

The trade of materials and people which underpinned the imperial project is symbolised, through the recurring image of a ship sailing across the horizon line from one edge of the frame to the other. The ship I depict in The Santiago Cross is drawn from an ‘ex voto’ painting from the Cathedrale de la Rochelle called, La Rochelle Slave ShipLe Saphir, painted in 1741. 

Outside the frame of the image art as a ‘trade’ is deliberately revealed in the images by revealing the ‘tools of my trade’. The process of production is revealed through the inclusion in the image of the ink, rollers, scissors, rags and turpentine. These objects are comparable to Velásquez’s deliberate exposure of his palette and paintbrush. The polymer material onto which the images are printed extends this concept as it was the matrix onto which the original images were painted. The dialectical relationship between the actual (the tools) and the imaginary (the depicted image) extends the gaze of the artist from behind his easel to deliberately reveal the labour of art and the fracture between the real and the illusion.

The Santiago Cross provokes questions of militarism and imperialism, and continuities of these ideas in the present; images of sea and ships capture the scope and hubris of colonial imaginings. Other works challenge narratives of the appropriation of land, ideas of the environment, and the cultural, economic and political hierarchies that enabled this. 

Trade Ship – Blessed is the first print of the triptych and marks the beginning of the journey and quotes the original image which depicts slaves and slavers, with God in the right hand corner, ambiguously blessing or urging the ship on.