“I kept my composure very well till I went into my desolate little Pigsty alone, then I had a regular outburst which I tried hard to overcome...I could sit & write to the Queen to tell her to remove me as I could not bear it. I shall never understand why such a horrid sacrifice of all I love & care for should have been made, it is so hard to bear...The solitude is dreadful” The voice of a teenager from 160 years ago, torn from too many homes, put forth as the exemplar of a thousand global dynamics & international intrigues. What it looks like to have the fulcrum of a swiftly tilting world rest on your image, as economies shift from chattel slavery to modern colonial violences, as the paternal impulses of empire buy you ornate Victorian frocks. These words, written intricately as lace, found in a shop by my parents, transcribed by my mom, written about by my pop, whisper of a loneliness too familiar in this age of image, constantly managing how we are read, what we are made to represent. I wonder if the shifts in what she represented, from colonial poster-child to aspirational “African princess” of TV movies, has soothed her isolation. I have sought, in my work about her, to include her voice in all its tears and ‘regular outburst,’ and to take the fulcrum of the pivoting world from her shoulders, and look at the myths spun around her: King Gezo, written as both a monster and a dandy, ringed with human skulls- proof of “savagery” while Europe collected these same artifacts by the 1000s, still in museums today- to the burgeoning & brutal palm oil trade, which echoes through every hand washing and Unilever product. At the show, with folks- friends, all who know something about what it means to be put forth as an example, to represent our various communities, I imagined this young person, writing letters, reaching out for some sliver of community, a being seen without being looked at. Looking at my own folks, we can remember her as one early in-betweener, of many more who came after, caught between worlds and myths. I hope somewhere that she feels a little less alone. Come. Read her words. Part of a series of tapestries woven round her. 9 Cork St London. 10.7-10.23