Final Project
CORAL BEADS
Statement of Intent by Helen Mandley
As an artist in 2014, I intend to record my
interpretations of human nature, our impact on each other and my awareness of
movements be they right or wrong in the world.
I want to tweak a thought and arouse a curiosity for
the viewer to explore further.
My final piece is called ‘Coral Beads’ and I am
addressing Human Trafficking with first hand knowledge of someone and from a
historical and cultural standpoint .
I was with my friend Huseina, who herself has been
trafficked as a domestic slave and
witnessed her Aunties attitude when leaving church one day, with the male
cousin ready to escort Huseina home. When
I saw her next, I asked why her Aunty was so rude to her, she explained that’s
her upbringing, it’s wrong in her culture to answer back, especially as ‘A
Girl’
From this point there was an unfolding of her own
upbringing in Agenebody, Edo State East, Capital Benin City, Nigeria,
about her home life and her struggles and experience of domestic servitude with
initial oblivion to her own trafficking,
her husband at home as well as the impact on her two young children
leaving their father and her beloved
mother for what she believed was a better life, knowingly entering the
UK illegally and bound by cultural duty to her ‘Aunty’, being escorted by her
‘male cousin’ only to come home day after day to more cooking, cleaning,
physical and verbal and mental abuse, this all happening a few streets away from my own home.
Relating to Context is Everything and my own bag of
items I have a connection with, I asked Huseina
if she would share with me any items she may have that she holds dear.
She showed me her mother’s Coral Beads, given to her when she left Edo State.
Cherished by my friend and kept in a
safe place, Huseina described to me how they offer her protection by keeping
her close to her mother. My question
is, ‘how women and girls can be adorned in coral beads as a sign of prestige,
beauty and status but they as humans can also be traded?’
From this discussion I felt the need to use Coral
Beads in a sculpture, threading them one by one in groups or singular to
represent a trafficked person from Edo State, the research I did fell into
place, coral beads being used as a currency for over 500 years as well as other
goods and among that Edo people traded for domestic servitude with Portuguese
traders dating back to the 1500s. This
shows me the cultural acceptance Huseina has spoken of and how complex an issue
this is, almost supporting my idea of a net or web like structure referring to
trapping people.
Relating to Romuald Hazoume and the Cargo Land work
he has done with containers, I wanted to relate to Human Trafficking. I also
revisited Man’s Cloth by El Anatsui at the British Museum for inspiration as
well as observing again the Benin statues of warriors and rulers adorned in
coral. A colleague shared Kara Walkers ‘A Subtlety’ of sugar sculptures of
African American slaves and showing them in an Egyptian Sphinx setting, I found
this inspiring and have also used sugar, melted to separate each bead, sugar is
also a local crop in Edo State east and was amongst the goods traded with the
Portuguese in the 1500s.
I feel as an Artist I am developing my sculptures
and find this an area that I will work in again and again, I love the idea of
on site installations such as Phileda Barlowe’s work at Tate Britain and I wish
to install Coral Beads in an alcove of the library for the college exhibition
amongst books of trade and economy, similarly to Andy Goldsmith’s sculptures in
natural surroundings.
(3) http://www.raceand
history.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl?md=read;id=2313
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