Modern Slavery Mixed Artwork (Lithophane, Sculpture and Digital Media)
Exhibited in Bath The Holburne Museum 17/05/2024 – 30/05/2024
Johan Zoffany’s oil painting The Auriol and Dashwood Families and the multitude of candle holders were the inspiration for my piece.
The servants and slaves in the background caught my attention and I started researching. Unfortunately, slavery still exists today. There are more slaves today than before slavery was abolished. The number of slaves is close to 50 million in the world.
With my work, I would like to draw attention to this fact and to the fact that today’s slavery is a hidden slavery, but its signs are easily recognizable.
The frame of my creation is provided by a chair, which in this case is the skeleton of the slave himself. The confining of the lithophane face to a narrow place symbolizes how a person’s personality is damaged when they are oppressed and how a person tries to break out of slavery since all people are born free and this is their normal state.
One of the lithophane images on the hand-held lantern is the characters in the painting and three others are the hidden slaves of the 21st century. I chose this technique because if we don’t light it, the content of the image remains hidden, in the same way that modern slavery itself works.
One leg shaped like a root suggests that slavery is rooted deep in human history and refers to Alex Haley’s book Roots.
The other leg is an image of suffering accompanied by a terrifying chain rattling sound effect to achieve a more perfect effect.
