Lela Harris is a British Mixed Heritage, self-taught artist, who found an audience - and her first professional commission - through sharing her work on Instagram. Lela describes her first commission working on the Folio Society’s first illustrated version of The Color Purple by Alice Walker as a ‘dream come true’. The work saw Lela become runner-up in the V&A Illustration Awards 2022 for her cover design. Following this success, Lela won a second commission called ‘Facing the Past’.
Facing the Past
The city of Lancaster, in the north of England, was the fourth biggest slave trading port in the UK during the 18th Century, something that few of its current inhabitants are aware of. The Judges’ Lodgings Museum, along with Lancaster Black History Group, two local universities, the city council and the museums service, set up ‘Facing the Past’ to explore this side of Lancaster’s history. The museum has several portraits of the elite of Lancaster who financially benefited from the slave trade, but no portraits of the enslaved Africans who came through Lancaster. The ‘Facing the Past’ project looked to redress this imbalance.
Lela Harris was commissioned to use historical records and her creative processes to develop portraits of four enslaved Black Africans who came through Lancaster during the 1700s.
Fragments of historical fact
But how do you create portraits of people for whom you have no visual references?
Lela says, ‘Initially, I spent as much time researching the subjects of the portraits as I did drawing and painting because I wanted to get to know them as individuals before I thought about what they might look like. For each portrait candidate, I developed a fact sheet. I looked at what was fact, what was conjecture, what connections could be made to other portraits within the museum, and noted down the creative thoughts I had for each of the individuals.’
Using baptism and burial records online, Lela found information about 39 Black Africans who came to Lancaster. Some of those enslaved Africans ran away from their owners, and the Runaway Slaves Database from Glasgow University offered up clippings from newspaper adverts about them.
One of the individuals Lela researched was a young person named as ‘Ebo boy’ in a newspaper advert. The advert tells us Ebo boy is 16 years old and 5 foot 3 inches tall (160cm), and that he has beautiful features, a small lump on his forehead, country marks (scarifications) on his temples, and that he walked with a limp. The advert tells us about the clothes he was wearing - a blue jacket, grey cloth waistcoat and leather breeches. It tells us he was born in Africa, lived in Heysham, Lancashire, and spoke in a broad Lancashire dialect. To develop a strong local accent, we can assume he must have been in the area for a long period of time. We also know he was seen to be valued property because there’s a high reward hinted at in the advert. And we can hope that he was not found after he ran away because he is not mentioned in the will of his owner, Reverend Clarkson.
Lela says, ‘I trawled through the archives and tried to represent each of the individuals using these small bits of information. It’s fascinating to bring these untold stories to life and to see how we can use them as a starting point to carry on their stories, to connect the past to the present.’
Turning historical fact into a human portrait
‘From this point, I started to imagine what this boy could look like emotionally before I thought about what he looked like physically,’ says Lela. ‘What is his name? Was he an orphan or was he forcibly separated from his parents? Why wasn’t he baptised, even though he was owned by a Reverend? Did somebody within the town of Heysham help him run away?’
These snippets of information and the questions they invoked in Lela led to an artwork in which Ebo boy is seen sitting thinking about both his past and his next steps. The choice of media - a collage of pastel, biro, charcoal, gouache, pen and ink - illustrates how we’re all made of different facets.
Reflecting on the media she used, Lela says, ‘I benefit from being a self taught artist - I haven’t set any boundaries for myself. I was given a lot of freedom at the museum to create what best reflected the lives of those enslaved Africans.’
Lela was commissioned for four portraits but ended up producing six. In contrast to Ebo boy, the portrait Lela created of Frances Elizabeth Johnson - a woman brought from St Kitts to Lancaster to live with a wealthy family - was done in pastel. Lela describes why. ‘I try to match my medium to the individual and this was a more emotional story. In the Johnson’s family narrative, they described Frances as a beloved servant, but after her death, they mummified her hand and kept it on the family mantelpiece for 200 years. It was finally buried in 1997. To tell her story, I used a medium I was more comfortable working in - pastel - and spent time getting her gaze right.’
Sharing with the local community
Working with a teacher, who is also a member of the Lancaster Black History Group, Lela ran workshops with young people in local schools, talking them through the process of using the newspaper snippet to discover Ebo boy’s story, so that they could develop their own portraits.
‘Working with the schoolchildren was great, I’d never done art workshops before. They were sponges for knowledge, so inspiring. They accepted Ebo Boy like he was a classmate and wanted to know his story. To reflect the young man's African heritage, the children, supported by creative practitioner and founding member of Lancaster Black History Group (LBHG) Geraldine Onek, decided to dignify him with the name ‘Afamefuna’ meaning ‘my name will not be lost’ in Igbo. It’s important to think of the portrait subjects not just as enslaved Africans but as people we may have met in our everyday lives and who could be our friends or cousins. It was important for the exhibition and for their stories to humanise them.’
The ‘Facing the Past : Black Lancastrians’ exhibition runs until 5 November and is supported by Art Fund, the Association of Independent Museums, National Lottery Heritage Fund and Lancashire County Council.
You can stay up to date with Lela Harris' work on Instagram.