Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain

Unsettling Subjects

Toronto-based artist Joscelyn Gardner traces her white creole ancestry in Barbados back to the seventeenth century. In Creole Portraits III: “bringing down the flowers,” Gardner explores the linkages among Enlightenment-inspired natural history projects, imperialism, and the plantation economy in the British West Indies. Each of the thirteen lithographs combines a “portrait” of an enslaved woman who faces away from the viewer, a collar that would have been used to torture and control enslaved persons, and a natural history-inspired depiction of a plant that enslaved women in the colonies deployed as an abortifacient to terminate unwanted pregnancies, including those that resulted from rape.

Gardner’s primary source is the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, an Englishman who immigrated to Jamaica in 1750 and was a surveyor, overseer, slaveowner, and landowner, living on the island until his death in 1786. Gardner names each piece by the Linnaean classification of the depicted abortifacient—acknowledging the imperial role that natural historian Carl Linnaeus’s classification system played in attempts to order the world—and, in parentheses, by the name of an enslaved woman whom Thistlewood raped, as formulaically recorded in his diaries. Mirtilla of Petiveria aliacea (Mirtilla) appears in the diary entry included in this exhibition.