Starting the debate
Harewood House has launched a series of projects this summer to explore black history and promote diversity. Chris Bond reports.
Back in May, Harewood House featured in an ITV documentary, presented by Sir Trevor McDonald and Charlene White, exploring racism and its history. David Lascelles, Earl of Harewood, spoke of what he, the Countess of Harewood and Harewood House Trust have done to address the estate’s heritage. “I think it’s a period of history that as a nation, we’ve not come to terms with properly,” he said. “I think that, until we do, a lot of the divisions, a lot of the conflicts, can’t be resolved until we understand our history.”
Much of Britain’s wealth in the 18th-century came from the sugar plantations and the Lascelles family built up vast fortunes from sugar, cotton, tobacco and rum – all on the back of the slave trade.
Harewood House was built from these proceeds – and it’s not something the Trust and the modern day Lascelles family have shied away from discussing. They have been at the forefront of acknowledging the estate’s colonial past for more than 25 years, and have commissioned artists of diverse heritage and spoken about the family’s links to the Slave Trade. This resulted in a yearlong programme of events to mark the bicentenary of the Abolition of Slavery in 2007, featuring Geraldine Connor’s Carnival Messiah, an epic reimagining of Handel’s Messiah.
The murder last year of George Floyd and its profound impact on the Black Lives Matter movement was the trigger for a renewed focus on promoting diversity and inclusion and combating racism.
It has led to the launch of a series of projects including the introduction of A Storm at Harewood – a walking story run by Joe Williams and Vanessa Mudd of Heritage Corner, in which they explore black history and hidden connections to Harewood through the guise of Pablo
Fanque and his wife. Fanque was Britain’s first recorded circus owner of African heritage and brought his circus to the Harewood area in 1847.
Last month, an exhibition by glassblower Chris Day opened in Harewood’s All Saints’ Church as part of a new, biannual, Craft Spotlight series to provide a platform for emerging makers and designers from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
Day is a glass and ceramic artist who creates glass artworks influenced by back history and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, so when he was contacted by Hannah Obee, director of collections, programming and learning for the Harewood House Trust, about exhibiting in the chapel, he was keen to be involved.
“As a black glassblower, I am one of few and on a quest to find and inspire more. My main purpose, however, is to engage the audience on issues that are hard to confront on many levels, using art to help overcome some of the traumas that haunt our collective past,” he says.
Day comes from a mixed race background, Jamaican and Anglo-Irish, and has spent time researching the history of the slave trade in the 18th Century and the civil rights movement. He says some people perhaps don’t realise just how ingrained slavery was in this country at one time. “The churches were involved, the banks were involved, everyone was involved. Even people who had a butcher’s shop or a carpentry business could buy into slavery, they could have a part-owned share of a slave.”
The slaves themselves were seen as nothing more than a commodity. “They were like a slice of beef or things we transport today, like clothes or mobile phones. They weren’t seen as human.”
Day combines the iridescent beauty of his glass work with the treatment of black people and our colonial heritage. “I’ve always said my work’s like a spider’s web. I try to entrap people with the beauty of the glass and then there’s this deeper conversation to be had if they want to.”
He believes there is a greater awareness of racism and the issues surrounding it than ever before. “Black Lives Matter and poor old George Floyd have propelled everything. Five years ago, would people have been interested in the stories of Emmett Till (a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955) and George Stinney (who was executed in the US at the age of 14 in 1944)?” he says. When I started doing work about slavery I thought ‘how can I talk about it? But then I thought ‘if I don’t do it, then who is?’”
Part of the appeal of exhibiting at Harewood was his desire to reach a wider audience. “I want to reach the school kids, the grandmas and the granddads, people who might not often go to