Free Online artist talk with Tracey Thorne who will be sharing her recent work that will be shown in the exhibition Intended for Jamaica at the Library of Birmingham which opens on the 10 May 2024. 

Intended for Jamaica is an artist-led project responding to archives in the Boulton and Watt Collection at the Library of Birmingham. The new work focuses on an unseen part of the archive in the collection that sheds light on the sale of Boulton and Watt Co. steam engines from Soho Foundry near Birmingham to sugar plantations in Jamaica during the nineteenth century. This story represents a missing chapter in the narrative of pioneering industrial heroes Boulton, Watt, and Murdoch, one that is interwoven with the threads of transatlantic slavery, indentured (bonded) labour, and the enduring legacies of colonialism.

The project seeks to explore the collection through artist research that has also informed fieldwork in…