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 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 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.