Volta do Mar (2021-2024)
A multidisciplinary research project exploring personal ties to colonial trade, memory, and empire from my birthplace in Cumbria. The work spans film, performance, sound, ceramics, print and textiles.
Sound was composed and produced by jazz artist Ruth Naomi Floyd. Ceramics produced in collaboration with Rachel Ho.
Film (4K, HD, 1:78, Stereo, 18 mins), porcelain, calico, four colour CMYK screen prints, reupholstered chairs.
Volta do Mar references a navigational technique perfected by the Portuguese during the Age of Discovery in the 15th century. Literally translated as “to return from the sea,” this technique harnesses the westerlies, or ‘anti-trade winds,’ to navigate ships back from the Caribbean and America to Europe. Here, it serves as a metaphor to reconsider our relationship to place, memory, history, and empire.
Filmed over a number of years in the artist’s birthplace of Cumbria, the work traces the dark history of Whitehaven, raising questions about the artist’s own complicity as a white British artist.
Through movement, ritual, gesture, and objects, the artist invites us to meditate on our interwoven histories in a reparative gesture—a lament towards the healing of the land.
The film is complemented by vocals and flute composed by acclaimed American jazz artist Ruth Naomi Floyd, whose great-great-grandmother was an enslaved African in America.
Watch an interview with Elizabeth by Alastair Gordon talking about this work.
Related works: Toile du Transatlantique, Broken Punch Bowls, Volta do Mar Prints, Am I not a Woman and a Sister,
