Tracey Thorne
Golden Grove Sugar Factory, St Thomas
Boulton & Watt Order Book
Golden Grove Sugar Factory, St Thomas
Intended for Jamaica
Intended for Jamaica is an artist-led body of work responding to unseen archives in the Boulton & Watt Collection at the Library of Birmingham and informed by fieldwork in Jamaica. It traces the sale of Boulton & Watt steam engines from Soho Foundry to Jamaican sugar plantations during the nineteenth century. It seeks to challenge the dominant narratives of Birmingham's industrial heritage to recover the marginalised histories of enslavement and imperialism entangled within it.
In bringing together artefacts, histories and places — connecting Birmingham to Jamaica, archive to plantation site, past to present — it invites a re-membering of how this city's story is bound up in sugar, empire and colony, and the legacies that endure.
Photo Essay