“Oh! that will soon be settled. Sir Thomas has been writing about it, I know.”
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
Writing Chair, 2024
Mansfield Park is a story, that at first glance exudes gentry luxuries, dark-mahogany interiors and dizzying love triangles. But the Bertrams’ opulent lifestyle and wealth depends on the exploitation of Antiguan land and people. Quite early on, it is clear that Sir Thomas Bertram will take a long absence away to the West Indies, where he must ensure that ‘business in Antigua’ is thriving! A business trip that is vital for the family’s prosperity. However, throughout the novel, there is a ‘dead silence’ around the Bertrams’ family’s accumulation of wealth. The undisclosed story behind the Bertrams' prosperity is the transatlantic slave trade.
The slave trade was threatened on multiple occasions by uprisings. For example, the eighteenth-century Ghanaian-Antiguan activist and hero Prince Klass planned an uprising in Antigua in 1736, and his attempt at claiming freedom led to his execution.
The cross-stitch situated within the seat-rails hints at the foundation of the Bertams’ wealth, and weaves together the unnamed rebels behind liberation; a group of slick, Antiguan revolts, hiding between the high-rise sugar cane. Brown speculates that the trouble on the Bertams’ estate in Antigua is in fact a rebellion, and considers the prominent significance of uprisings in establishing and propelling the anti-slavery movement in the UK, and subsequently emancipation.
Writing chairs were familiar furniture pieces in gentry homes, designed to create ease and comfort when writing. Much of the furniture at Sotherton in Mansfield Park is made with mahogany wood, a tree native to the Caribbean, which was farmed and felled by enslaved communities.
Rural English landscapes are prominent scenes in Jane Austen’s writings. In the installation, Brown focuses on the West Indian landscape, and the geopolitical stirrings happening during the regency era, probing viewers to further contemplate Jane Austen’s family’s relationship to the West Indies, too.