The dead eye rigging block held the ropes that were essential to the tall ships. This work is made up of multiple dead eye blocks from different ships.
These wooden “dead eyes “ are what remains of many of the ships that carried enslaved people and extracted plants and timber from Africa.
The ropes in this work are black and plaited like the expressions of love and care that is black hairstyles. They form a rigging on which the “dead eyes” ascend.
What this work asks for me is in what way are we growing and caring for the slave ship today in the same way that we grow and care for our hair?
The rigging is for me the most interesting part of the ship as it relates to both the enslaved and the descendants of the enslaved.
Rigging is a kind of ladder, climbing up is a metaphor for progression and betterment ideas key to the enslavers journey and the descendants of the enslaved.
On the slave ship people who were enslaved were mostly chained in the hold but those that climbed up the rigging were not the most elevated that was the captain who stayed on deck telling others when to climb, and what to do when they got up there. and when to come down.
What this work wonders for me is: How can we, the descendants of people who were once enslaved, ascend in a society founded on the wealth created by slavery? These blocks ascend the rigging. They no longer labour to hold it. But when I look at these dead eyes, free of their old labour, now able to climb and look out, I wonder what kind of success that is?
The sculpture has two parts that converge as a kind of X. One part is rigging a ladder, and the other part is just tethering. The cross-rigging part is absent.
I wonder what we are tethered to as black people. What would it mean to release from that?
An X is the mark we were asked to make on documents. It stands in for us and the names we lost. Malcom claimed that loss explicitly in his surname. The X points to the inadequacy of archives. X marks the spot, but in terms of loss, the X is not a known or singular site.
This work reveals some of the terror of the ship that uses threaded skulls to propel itself forward. I find it strangely comforting. Was anything but destruction ever possible from such a vessel?
I have looked at the wood in country houses and amplified it. I hope I have been able to do that for the wood in ships.
I hope this is a spiritual archive of the ship as a machine for a terrible kind of “progress” in multiple ways that prompt us to think about our own “progress” in the wake of this particular tall ship’s slavery.
