The Seeds in Our Wombs

Rooted in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, this collection of works is inspired by acts of resistance of enslaved women. Protesting the demands enforced on them, such as continually producing offspring, enslaved women found ways to induce miscarriages through eating plants such as the Peacock Flower, a bush sprouting bright yellow and orange flowers. This allowed them to reject the consequence of creating future enslaved babies and to regain a sense of agency over their bodies and identities.

Enslaved Africans believed that lost souls were born again in their homeland. Inspired by this mythology I have created a series of works that tell the story of unborn babies, who are taken by the Yoruba Ocean Goddess, Yemaya to live underwater in a new civilisation of black people. This relates to an afro-futuristic fiction inspired by the belief that unwanted pregnant African women were thrown overboard slave ships and while they didn’t survive, their unborn babies did and created a utopian civilization for black people in the middle of the atlantic ocean.

This series of patchworks and textile collages speaks to the ways women reclaimed power in such oppressive circumstances and honours all the babies mothers have lost in efforts to resist.