Caste | Cast

Leah Gordon is interested in the representational boundaries between art, religion, anthropology, post-colonialism and folk history.

Taking her unfinished photography project the Caste Portraits as her starting point, her new project Caste | Cast, for HOUSE, explored junctures between shared Haitian and British histories and cosmologies, with an emphasis on the links between the slave trade and the industrial revolution. The new body of work combined moving image and photography to create an interconnected installation across two rooms at The Regency Town House.

Beginning with the Caste series of photographs, Gordon investigated the practice, created by a French colonialist living in Haiti during the slave plantation period, of grading skin colour from black to white, marking the extent of racial mixing in 18th century colonial Haiti.

The work was exhibited alongside a film of a journey along the Manchester Ship Canal, from Manchester to Liverpool, past Ellesmere Port, the town where Leah Gordon was born (equidistant between Liverpool, a city built upon the slave trade and Manchester, built upon the Industrial revolution). The journey highlights the shared economic and political histories that connect Haiti and Britain, and the slave trade and the industrial revolution.

Two further films were shown in the former library room, one of the ruined and overgrown machinery, manufactured in Liverpool in 1818, on a former plantation in Haiti and one of the storage rooms in the National Archives at Kew, where Haiti’s Declaration of Independence was found. These films showed Haiti’s history hidden and embedded in Britain’s colonial archives whilst Britain’s industrial past lies rusting and overgrown in Haiti’s tropical landscape. These historical reflections sit alongside a prophetic photographic reconstruction of William Blake’s illustration of Europe Supported by Africa and the Americas.

Caste | Cast is a HOUSE 2014 commission.

No One Owns The Land

No One Owns The Land was a collaborative sculptural installation by artist-makers Ester Svensson and Rosanna Martin. Their practices explore ideas of travel, movement, restlessness, identity and belonging.

The installation occupied the hallway of The Regency Town House basement and extended into the kitchen, visually and physically weaving together stories of journeys and migrations, places and imagined lands.

The narratives found within the work are informed by people the artists have met, stories they have read and heard, as well as their own experiences.

No One Owns the Land is made primarily of ceramic and glass materials, in both unfired and fired states as well as thread, wire, sand, stones, glass wax, inks, glue, soap, shower gel, nail varnish, paint, plaster and wood. It features boats, oceans, landslides and figures of people. Abstract representations of borders and bureaucracy are made by tangles of displaced material. Places of refuge are depicted through forests, and isolation is inferred through huge expanses of sand.

No One Owns The Land is a HOUSE 2014 commission.