Article: Wirebird issue 53, 2024

The Friends of St Helena, a charity founded in 1988, provides information about St Helena, including its history, culture, environment and current affairs and to provide practical support to the St Helenian community. I was asked to contribute to its annual history magazine ‘Wirebird’ about the influence of my St Helenian heritage on my work as a visual artist.

An excerpt of my article ‘Sailing Equipped’:

The Waterwitch monument, a marble pillar erected in the Castle Gardens in 1843, was the first landmark I recall from my arrival at the island. I was struck by an inscription: Clarence Taylor. Mate. Son of Wm. Taylor Esqre. of Purbrook Hants. I was as far from my home² as I’d ever been, reeling from a recent ‘who’s you family to, luvvie?’, and in front of me was a monument to a chap from the Hampshire village I rode my bike in as a teenager. With the Waterwitch’s origins on the Isle of Wight and her home port being Portsmouth, there were likely many places where my path had crossed with her crew, albeit at a different time (Pearson 2016a). 

2 Growing up, the word ‘home’ was synonymous with St Helena.  My extended family unit, based mostly in Portsmouth, lived with a sense of home as a distant elsewhere, and those powerful echoes remain to this day

Pearson, A. 2016a. ‘Waterwitch: a warship, its voyage and its crew in the era of anti-slavery’, Atlantic Studies 13(1), 99–124.

Download a PDF of the article here