00:00I considered myself to be blessed to have won the commission to create this sculpture, public sculpture, 20 years ago in 2005.
00:09I was commissioned to make the piece by Professor Alan Rice, whose idea it was to have a memorial sculpture in Lancaster.
00:20This was part of the stamp project, which is the slave trade art memorial project.
00:25And the commission was to make a memorial sculpture that acknowledges or acknowledged Lancaster's involvement in the slave trade.
00:36Initially, the other designs was to have a kind of almost like a William Wilberforce slave with chains.
00:45So it would be once again, it would be the black body that is on display and scrutinized.
00:51I chose not to do that, but the simple reason being, I think the black body is already under so much scrutiny in popular culture, visual culture, that to have another one, I just didn't think was right.
01:06What I would do was turn it on its head and put the slave trade itself on display to be scrutinized, which is why I created an abstract of one of the slave ships, one of the many slave ships that came in.
01:22And then here, this is the representative of the cargo levels inside the ship.
01:29So you would have the slaves, rum, sugar, mahogany, cotton.
01:35And then at the top, I've got the wealth, which represents the wealth that came from the slave trade.
01:42And this represents the slave triangle.
01:46And more importantly, these figures here were made by young people in Lancaster.
01:55I cast their work in iron and then we cited it here.
02:01This is the first one that was made in the north, right?
02:06And it's cited here because this is where 29,000 slaves came up from the River Loon.
02:14And it's the only sculpture, public sculpture, to memorialize involvement in the slave trade in the country by a key sign.
