Created performance/sound piece. Exploring human and elemental restrictions and restraints. Turner’s painting of ‘The slave ship’ (1840) based on 1. poem that described slave ship in typhoon and 2. the true story of the slave ship ‘Zong’, whose captain had thrown sick and dying slaves into sea so that he could collect insurance money for slaves ‘lost at sea’. Turner accompanied painting with extract of his own poetry:
“Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay, Yon angry setting sun and feirced edged clouds, declare the typhoons coming. Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard the dead and dying – ne’er heed their chains. Hope, hope, fallacious hope! where is thy market now?” (Fallacies of hope, 1812, Turner)
Turner appears to be pitying the slaves but also the slavers – the slavers had a restriction placed on them, imposed by their greed for their money. I created a short performance/sound piece titled’blood on their hands’, where I tried to represent the slavers.
PAULA MUSGROVE 