Lucille Junkere
National Wool Museum
BIO
Lucille Junkere is a research-based visual artist specialising in botanical and ochre pigments, sustainable textiles and embroidery. Her research focuses on the impact of colonisation on African Caribbean textile history. One of the enduring legacies is the destruction of indigenous African knowledge systems. The physical, emotional, and spiritual dispossession caused by the transatlantic slave trade means that ancestral and cultural identities have been severed. Lucille explores a past connected to chattel slavery using the materiality of cloth, visual symbolism, botanical and ochre pigments, especially the pigment she loves - indigo to consider loss, grief, racism, healing, resistance and cultural reconnection.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Welsh Plains, also known as Negro cloth, was a low-quality woollen textile woven in mid-Wales between 1650 and 1850. British merchants and enslavers used the fabric to purchase and clothe African captives, kidnapped to work on plantations in America and the Caribbean during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Lucille considers the role of Welsh Plains in suppressing and denigrating the African cultural identity of enslaved people. Inspired by West and Central African masks and other cultural artefacts, she explores the Akan, Ashanti, Yorùbá, Igbo, Ibibio, Éwé and Bantu heritage of the people enslaved to work on Britain’s most lucrative plantation, Jamaica.
QUOTE
"I applied to Perspective(s) to respond to Welsh Plains. While valuable research exists on the material, the perspective of those forced to wear the uncomfortable, scratchy woollen cloth is missing. I wanted to introduce an artistic and curatorial approach that does not minimise the atrocities of the British Empire. Instead, I wanted to create compelling displays and narratives that do not present palatable versions of history but reveal multiple stories while amplifying and celebrating marginalised voices."
SOCIAL MEDIA / WEBSITE
Website:https://lucillejunkere.com/