Elsa James’s exhibition in my home county, Essex, is a potent rejection of the erasure of history

Stepping on a body is an uncomfortable experience, even if that body is only in photographic form. However, it is impossible to enter Elsa James’s exhibition at Firstsite, in Colchester, UK, without walking over multiple larger-than-life images of the British African-Caribbean artist lined up in rows—and covering the entire floor of the first main gallery. In most her eyes are closed, but in one instance she looks directly up, raising her hands as if to protect herself.

This expanse of prone bodies deliberately recalls the notorious diagram of enslaved Africans crammed into the Liverpool slave ship the Brooks. James emphasises this association by calling the work—which also includes an elegiac cello soundscape composed by Kirke Gross—Beyond the Hold.

“It’s not actually me, you’re walking on the history that has been silenced. If you are forced to take off your shoes and walk on it, you have to pay more attention,” the artist says. She adds that she regards her show at the arts centre as a “direct and unapologetic” means of confronting Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and the “collective amnesia” that has followed. Yet as well as being a site of subjugation she also sees the ship’s hold as representing “the resilience deeply embedded in the human spirit”, and a place of hope as well as horror. “I’m here because my ancestors survived that journey and the torture of plantation life,” she states. “It’s personal and political for me.”

Personal and political

This interplay between political and personal, trauma and strength runs throughout. The show includes grim reminders of Britain’s role in trafficking African people, while also subverting and challenging conventional historical accounts by offering new perspectives. Case in point is the room devoted to Phibbah and Molia, two enslaved women featured in the infamous journals kept by their 18th-century owner Thomas Thistlewood, in which he meticulously chronicled the daily brutalities of his Jamaican plantation. Now, thanks to a series of wall-mounted text works by James—giving an invented voice to the duo—they emerge as ingenious, defiant individuals, vividly recounting their acts of rebellion and relishing their brief moments of respite.

“If it wasn’t for Thistlewood and his diaries we wouldn’t know about these women—but we only know what he did to them in his words,” James says. “I wanted to give them back their voices and let them tell a new story.”

This is not the first time that James has given sidelined Black female figures new agency. She first attracted my attention back in 2019 with her Black Girl Essex residency, also held at Firstsite, which is situated in my hometown and my home county, Essex. James, also a long-term Essex resident, used the residency to grapple with the ostensibly jocular but demeaningly sexist notion of “Essex Girl”. This characterises women from the county as blonde, brash, promiscuous and uneducated, as well as sporting large breasts, fake tan and a penchant for lairy drunkenness and white stiletto shoes.

She used this prejudice—which was a bane of my early adulthood—to challenge wider preconceptions around race and gender. “As the ‘Essex Girl’ is a historically white stereotype, the idea of prefixing Essex with ‘Black’ seemed like a radical declaration that I felt compelled to unpack and explore,” she says.

For James, it was a means to show the reality of living in multicultural Essex today and to create “space for Black voices in Essex to be heard”, she says. The residency spurred on works such as a recreation of the 17th-century Essex county flag in shades of black satin, metallic lurex and patent leather in 2019. Then in 2022, she released the film Othered in a region that has been historically Othered, one sequence of which sees James ritually coating herself in dark blue paint to perform the Grenadian carnival figure of Jab-Jab, while standing in a quintessentially English “Constable Country” landscape.

She also delved into the county’s forgotten Black history, most notably in two films that pay homage to historical Black women with Essex links. One was Hester Woodley, an enslaved woman brought to England from the Caribbean and buried in the Essex town of Harlow in 1767, while the other was a West African beauty queen called Princess Dinubolu, who caused a national sensation when she took part in a beauty pageant in the seaside town of Southend in 1908. “I wanted to ground them in the present and reinterpret how they resonate with me as a Black woman living in Essex today,” says James, who assumes the roles of both the women in each film.

Moments of healing

In her latest show at Firstsite, James’s Afro Dada works on paper—which she will be making on site throughout the run of the show in a specially created studio—see her further address her heritage. She describes the notion of “Afro Dada” as “trying to make sense of the different identities that I carry, and how this would work visually”, with the layering of drawing, photomontage and collage in these new works a means to express “the rupture, erasure, fragmentation and also the interconnectedness of my ancestral lineage”. But as in all of James’s work, there is also a strong element of positivity. “I want to invite moments of understanding, healing and connection,” she says. “We need to be collective in how we move forward—it’s not just Black history, it’s all of our history.”

This is a point forcefully made in the show’s last room, which contains a single piece that offers an inclusive tweak to an inspirational Maya Angelou poem by declaring in letters of warm orange neon: STILL WE RISE.

• Elsa James: It Should Not be Forgotten, Firstsite, Colchester, until 6 July