The image - a detail taken from the 1789 diagram of 'The British Slave Ship 'Brookes'' - shifts according to the angle and source of the light. From one direction it becomes difficult to grasp, reflecting and seeming to disappear in parts. From another, the image becomes all too present. The horror is seen and unseen, like memory and history, both remembered and forgotten. Gold speaks of value; the cost of a human life, or the preciousness of an individual. 

The original 1789 print the detail is sourced from was commissioned by Thomas Clarkson and the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and used to highlight the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.