Zine Exhibition: Woven Histories of Welsh Wool and Atlantic Slavery

This event has ended.

An exhibition of a collection of zines exploring the colonial history of Welsh wool production and its links to the transatlantic slave trade and slavery.

As part of the 2022 ESRC Festival of Social Science and in partnership with Coleg Menai and @ZinesCymru, the School of Modern Languages’ Dr Charlotte Hammond (Cardiff University) organised a zine-making workshop in November to explore the colonial history of Welsh wool production and its links to the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. Zines are publications full of original or acquired texts and images, and the topics and themes of which vary, allowing designers free range in their creations. In the one-day workshop, the group of Art and Design Foundation students each created their own small zine to explore this history. This exhibition of zines produced by the students reveals the creative research methods deployed - drawing, cutting, collaging images, text and new narratives - as a form of alternative knowledge production. 

Welsh plains, Welsh cottons, or “Negro Cloth”, the name most often used by merchants and plantation owners, was a durable untreated woollen cloth woven in mid-Wales between 1650-1850. In the seventeenth century, Britain’s Royal Africa Company traded this textile against enslaved human lives on the west coast of Africa and by the eighteenth century it was commonly used to clothe enslaved people in the Caribbean and the southern states of the US.

The zine-making event was part of a HEFCW Research Wales Innovation Funding project (2022-23) to engage and educate new audiences in the history of the Welsh woollen industry and its connections to Atlantic slavery and empire. A small book of artwork, interviews and essays, titled Woven Histories of Welsh Wool and Slavery will be published with Common Threads Press in 2023.

The exhibition will be on display between 20-24 February, is free to see and is open to anyone.