The Mary Prince Narratives (2023) are extracted from The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself (1831). Mary is the first known Black woman to relate a narrative about the experience of being enslaved published in England. 

I have been drawn to bringing Mary’s story to the forefront of a contemporary dialogue because most of what we know about enslaved life comes from the diaries of slave traders, and the little first-hand accounts we have directly from enslaved people are from freed enslaved men.

This collection of extracted narratives forms Work No. 38 in The Blackness Series, which is an ongoing series of numbered text works, commencing in 2016 and continuing to date, documenting historical and contemporary Black-lived experiences alongside broader critical social commentary. The font is typically black typefaced on a black background, making the works intentionally arduous to read. Through this technique, the work attempts to accentuate how Black communities are held in the tension between hypervisibility and invisibility in our fractured world. The works become fully legible to read as light reflects and interacts with the work—whether on a digital screen display or with the work itself.
 
For optimal viewing, access this series on a desktop screen.