Shipmate/Shipment I

by Tia-Simone Gardner

The imagery you see in Shipmate/Shipment I is the result of an experimental drawing process that blurs the lines between drawing, printmaking, and photography and their respective relationships to memory. By means of a series of steps that include burning, coating, etching, and sanding, Tia-Simone Gardner transferred layers of photographic images to a panel. No longer visible, the first image she applied to the surface was Salt Water (right). Layered on top of that, is an image of the wrecked Clotilda, the last known ship to smuggle enslaved people from Africa to the Mobile, Alabama, decades after US-involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was illegal. Learn about Clotilda:

Roche, Emma Langdon. Historic Sketches of the South. United States, Knickerbocker Press, 1914.

Diouf, Sylviane A., and Sylviane A. Diouf Director, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Hurston, Zora Neale, et al. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”. United States, HarperCollins, 2018.