Sculptor: Hannah Honeywill
About the sculpture and photograph:
The sculpture at the heart of this photograph is made from an original Victorian mahogany table leg, cut into twenty four pieces to reference the twenty four vertebrae in the human spine. The slices are connected back together with cotton string. Mahogany was brought into the UK as ballast in the ships returning from trading slaves in the West Indies and the Americas; the wood was used to replace the weight of the bodies of the victims of slavery.
This piece considers the condition of concealing or ‘unseeing’ extreme cultural, political and historical acts of inhumanity and questions the continual presence of mahogany in public buildings and offices as a symbol of status and ‘Britishness’. In this photograph, the shaped mahogany is returned to the woodpile and shown in marked juxtaposition to its origins. The image of the woodpile also references the ‘stacking’ of bodies in the slave ships.
