Online text 

The Mary Prince Narratives Part l (2023) are online excerpts from The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself (1831). Prince 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 the autobiographical account of Mary Prince to the forefront of a contemporary discourse  because most of what we know and understand about enslaved life derives from the diaries of white slave traders and the limited first-hand accounts we have directly from enslaved individuals are from freed enslaved black men.”

This collection of extracted narratives forms Work No. 38 in The Blackness Series, 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 a black typeface 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 a fractured world. The works become fully legible as light reflects and interacts with them—whether on a digital screen or with the work itself.
 
For optimal viewing, access this series on a desktop screen.