For another Council for World Mission (CWM) gathering, I created an image as a visual meditation upon the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and the central place played by Bristol in its creation. We are watching through the bars of a prison, echoing all the barred windows through which slaves saw their world stolen. But suggesting, too, that racism and our unwillingness to reckon with the past ensnare us too. We watch the moment, on 7 June 2020 during the global protests following the murder of George Floyd in the United States when the statue of slaver Edward Colston was pulled down from its place in the heart of the city of Bristol which he gave much money to. The statue was then rolled down Anchor Road and pushed into Bristol Harbour, where so many slaving voyages had begun. That evening, a young black woman activist named Jen Reid stood on the plinth and raised her fist in salute. Her action was immortalised in countless mobile phone images, and when the artist Marc Quinn, days later, secretly erected a life-sized sculture of her on the plinth. On the right, numbers recall just how many slaving trips set out carrying a huge number of kidnapped African people on ships from Bristol, funded by Bristol merchants and generating vast wealth for them and their city. The names in capitals are Bristol-based slave owners and traders. The names in lower case (far fewer) are Bristol abolitionists.

Ref: WI.007

Medium: Charcoal, acrylic and collage on canvas

Year: 2012