From the Depths, a collaboration with the Making of Black Britain. Original 80x32” acrylic and pen on wood panel. 2021 by Bryn Gillette

Dr. Diane Louis Jordan, British television and radio host with a Jamaican heritage, partnered with Kem Anyanwu-Greene to record the stories and create a database called The Making of Black Britain or MOBB. This captured the experience of British citizens through the wake of the last 75 years of the Nationality Act; the law that gave all people in the British commonwealth full citizenship following WWII. The influx of immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, the Pacific, etc. flooded the post war population still reeling from the loss of so many soldiers and civilians and entirely reshaped the identity of the small British Isles redefining what it meant to be “British”… especially “Black British”.

Throughout the work are the nautical algorithms designed for deep sea search and rescue. The metaphor was so appropriate for the work of MOBB that was plumbing the depths of human and social experience to discover the meanings of identity, collective memory, value, and nationality.

During the painting of the work, an African-British scholar and author won the Nobel peace prize for his work cataloging the experience of the Black British… a phenomenal and unlooked for endorsement to the unfolding. [From the Noble Museum] Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

As an American with a strong Celtic heritage (I mean… my Welsh name is Bryn and my mother’s name is Bronwen… you don’t get more Welsh than that!), I felt an immediate “homecoming” as I painstakingly began this work by painting the specific shorelines of the British Isles, and especially as I flew over my heritage and homeland of Wales. As a teacher of Art History and the benefactor of the Abolitionist movement that began in Britain and spread to the United States decades later, I also embedded the work of William Turner’s Slave Ship as a memorial to the lives lost “to the depths” of injustice, evil, and the Leviathan who is incarnated and depicted swirling in his wrath and mass through the waters. Turner’s painting, a vignette hidden in the sale of the ship, showcased the controversial moment a slave ship owner threw his chained slave “shipment” overboard into shark invested water in fear of an oncoming storm in order to collect the insurance for their loss. The appalling episode, once brought to the public attention and amplified in part by Turner’s painting, helped turn public opinion and cause the downfall of the slave industry. What a powerful display of the power of art to impact and shape culture and identity.

A few years later, we shipped the work to London and gathered at King’s Cross station for the red carpet unveiling of the work. I’m so please that Dr. Diane Louis Jordan also agreed to come to the celebration and launch of my art tour “Kingdom Collaboration” and share her unique perspective on the role of the arts in shaping culture and bringing the gospel outside the walls of the church to impact all the spheres of society.

Other than scripture, my favorite regular reading material is National Geographic… and while the work was on display for the grand unveiling on the red carpet, the front cover of Nat. Geo was the African American story of “Into the Depths”… divers exploring sunken slave ship ruins and exhuming the past, heritage, and history of those enslaved and transporting; reshaping the cultural identity of African, Britain, the U.S., the Caribbean, and the entire world. On the night of the event, I painted live onto the work and added the vignette of the cover diver along with participants who came to celebrate that night and add their stories into the MOBB collection.