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Installation view of History Is Rarely Black or White. Photo: Tim Forbes
Cotton and the Canadian Consumer

Cotton and the Canadian Consumer

The Queen’s Collection of Canadian Dress, held at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, comprises a fine example of rare garments from the 1700s to the 1990s. Exhibition curator Jason Cyrus, and conservator Anne-Marie Guérin, selected cotton clothing from the 1800s to investigate the influence of global politics and enslavement on the cotton industry. Although England officially abolished slavery in 1833, cotton produced by enslaved labour comprised much of fabric imports until the American Civil War from 1861-65. How did these events influence the labour source of cotton?

 The garments displayed reflect a cross-section of social wealth, showcasing maternity clothes, an infant christening gown, childrenswear, wedding dresses, and menswear. All consumers across the gender and generational divide were implicated in the cotton trade.

Installation view of History Is Rarely Black or White.

Installation view of History Is Rarely Black or White. Photo: Paul Litherland

Installation view of History Is Rarely Black or White.

Installation view of History Is Rarely Black or White. Photo: Paul Litherland

The Global Reach of Cotton

The cotton industry was a complex enterprise that entangled many far-reaching areas of the globe –Canada included. Dr Vanessa Nicholas notes that finished cotton fabric was one of the most popular commodities at Canada’s early general stores. Such fabrics and commercial goods available in Canada before Confederation in 1867 were imported from Britain, and England’s cotton manufacturers were dependent on American cotton from the 1790s to the 1860s. Cotton produced during this period was harvested by the labour of enslaved Africans trafficked through the Transatlantic Slave Trade – thus implicating Canadian consumers in the human cost of cotton production.

Visualizing the Cotton Supply Chain

Artworks from Agnes’s European and Canadian Collections, and other archives, chart the people and places integral to the cotton trade in the 1700s to 1800s.

"Visualizing the Cotton Supply Chain" image credits
 Left to Right:
Adam Sherriff-Scott, Frontenac at Cataraqui 1673, undated, oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. John Irwin in Memory of John Irwin. Photo credit: Bernard Clark
George Stanfield Walters, A Summer Evening, Southampton Water (detail),  around 1900, oil on canvas. Gift of Muriel Schwob, 2005
Stowage of the British slave ship “Brookes” under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788 (detail), around 1788, photograph reproduction. Photo Credit: Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Printed Ephemera Collection
James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #1 Cotton Plantation (detail), 1840, lithograph with color. Mabel Brady Garvan Collection. Photo Credit: Yale University Art Gallery
James Pattison Cockburn, View North along King Street near St. George’s Church (detail), 1829, watercolour on paper. Gift of Chancellor Agnes Benidickson, 1987
James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #9 Reeding or Drawing In (detail), 1840, Photograph reproduction, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection. Photo Credit: Yale University Art Gallery

Karin Jones

Karin Jones’s multi-disciplinary practice examines the ways in which historical narratives shape our identities. Freed, her site-specific installation, unites the materiality of  Agnes’s cotton garments with their social and political history. Here, Jones places the labour integral to the cotton trade at the center of the narrative. Clouds of raw cotton and Black hair encircle the dress, forming a ‘remembering’ of the brutality, cultural erasure, and loss of life implicated in the creation of such garments.

Video
Karin Jones

My name is Karin Jones. I’m an interdisciplinary artist with a background in jewellery and I’ve created this work for the exhibition at the Agnes. So, my work in recent years has mostly been about the way that historical narratives shape our identities. And as a woman of African descent, a lot of this has been attached to the history of slavery. So, for this piece, I really was thinking about how that narrative of slavery is the really predominant story that gets told about black people in North America. And it’s a much stronger narrative that’s presented to us than, say, even the histories and cultures of the actual African countries that our ancestors would have been taken from. So, in a way, this story of slavery, and specifically about cotton fields, which gets used in so many countless movies and books becomes almost like an origin story of where we’re coming from. So, for this piece, I have natural cotton balls, and some of them, I’ve removed the cotton from the husk and glued in different people’s hair, so hair from black people in North America, just to show that, in a way, we’re growing out of those cotton fields. And for this piece, I also wanted it to be, these balls to be hanging, because it’s meant to be shown with historic garments, so that when we look at garments in a museum, we literally can’t look at the garment itself without also being confronted with this history.

Karin Jones’ Freed installation featuring strings of raw cotton bulbs and Black hair suspended around a wedding dress from 1893 from the Collection of Canadian Dress.

Karin Jones, Freed2021, cotton, hair, wire, and wood. Collection of the artist. Photo: Paul Litherland

A detail of Karin Jones's site-specific installation, Freed, showing the bulbs of raw cotton and Black hair.

A detail of Karin Jones’s site-specific installation, Freed, showing the bulbs of raw cotton and Black hair. Photo: Paul Litherland

Installation view of History Is Rarely Black or White with a view through the doorway to the exhibition With Opened Mouths. Photo: Paul Litherland
Footnotes
Image Credits