Sharon Walters: Held Tenderly

In this talk, Curator of the Atlantic Dr Nydia A. Swaby explores the forms tenderness takes in Sharon Walters’ Held Tenderly and the colonial photograph it reimagines. Made during Walters’ Caird Practice-Based Research Fellowship and displayed in The Many Invincible Ones at the Queen’s House, the work responds to an 1875 image of formerly enslaved African children aboard HMS Flying Fish.

Created in the context of violence, the photograph is also strikingly tender: the children lean into and hold one another, and Walters works with these gestures of closeness and care. Bringing together historic photographs of African women with images of crustaceans from the vessel’s later voyages, her collage reunites the children with mothers and ancestors. The talk considers how this careful looking and remaking honours the tenderness the children shared, while imagining the familial worlds from which the colonial photograph separates them.