Discovering The Sun On Earth
45′ x 45′ x 2′
Limestone
2021
2021 Mid-Career Fellowship Artist
Artist Statement
During the last 60 years of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, more than two thousand ships were condemned for the illegal trafficking of abducted Black forepersons. Names and information was recorded for 91,491 people found held captive of these ships. Among them 30,926 were children.
This pieces serves as a memorial and final resting site for these children. Limestone boulders stand in place of an ancestral stool. The stool is a symbol of unity, kinship, mutual solidarity and support of the community members. They provide a sense of belonging, sacred obligations, rights, loyalty and obedience. It gives a community its group identity with the land which has nurtured it and provides it with not only its sustenance but also its link with its past and future. The stool binds the people together in time and space and supports their belief in their community as a living and organic entity, a family with a continuous past, present and future.
It is impossible to begin to understand the experiences of these children and lay memorial to them in a foreign land unknown to their ancestral history. Similarly it impossible to have this piece without acknowledging the land on which it stands. This piece and its sourced limestone are on the ancestral homelands of the Wahpekute and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples.
be not abandoned of this place.
be laid to rest
in skies of purple and gold
so that ships may fly backwards
on prairie dog barks.