The three projects I discuss here focus on the rewriting of the history of Britain where it relates to the representation of the Black person and our position in the cultural landscape. The process of overpainting or painting over an existing image, not to obliterate but to highlight, is the dominant method I use here.

The making of Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service necessitated a commitment to a real and physical understanding of the city itself. I spent months walking the streets, intently looking, eagerly listening, reluctantly talking about, steadily reading about, as well as drawing and photographing everything that was left to experience from the period between 1736 and 1807 when the city was at the centre of the British trade in African people. It's clear that Lancaster is the shape and size and colour it is because of the money generated at its peak, and then lost as the trade was superseded by that in Liverpool. The street names, the buildings themselves, the surrounding rural landscape and the residual wealth present in the inhabitants’ idea of themselves and the city in which they live and work were central to the research process. The months following this initial period were spent visiting open and covered markets, scruffy junk shops and numerous charity shops across the region to buy the components of the 100-piece installation. This meant that I learned so much about ceramics generally, but transfer-printing the willow-pattern lustrewear and meat plates in particular became details I could get quite passionate about. Each plate, tureen and jug was overpainted in Liquitex acrylics using the pattern or motif already transfer-printed on the object to develop the idea. The portraits of the Black slave servants appeared on all the jugs and tureens so that their images were upright and looking out over the scene on the outside of the object, and could at the same time ‘contain’ an imagined spirit or memory and the real name of the figure (Figures 81–84). The plates, on the other hand (Figures 85–88), held a rich mixture of those for and against the trade in slaves, a variety of doctored landscapes and detailed images of actual ships and merchants’ houses, Lancaster maps and African patterns relating to this site of British slaving history.