From the 17th century to the early 19th century, ships carrying enslaved people sailed the ‘triangle’ from Africa to North America to Britain and back to Africa, plying a lucrative trade with a desperate human cargo. Peter Thellusson had business arrangements that profited from enslavement, among them part-ownership of slaving ships, including one ship, the Lottery, that is represented in one of the sculptures.

Sculptor Carl Gabriel recalls how he felt about making the piece: ‘The ship sculpture makes me think. I feel some emotional attachment to it because I grew up in the West Indies and had relatives there,’ he says.

The ships were cramped and living conditions appalling – many of the enslaved died on board, never reaching their destination, where they were intended to provide forced labour on plantations in the Caribbean. This sculpture addresses the idea of commodifying people as cargo and the act of dislocation – violently uprooting people from their homes, families and culture.

Peter Thellusson loaned money to plantation owners. His lending focused particularly on Grenada, including extensive loans to Peter and Marie Fournillier, who owned the Bacolet plantation. Thellusson’s loan agreement for Bacolet lists by name most of the 121 ‘Negro slaves’ who provided the unpaid workforce. Some were left unnamed, with a note that they were newly purchased and ‘cannot now be particularly ascertained and described’. The unpaid workers were considered property and grouped according to their skills.

‘There’s so much detail in this plantation worker, like the hat, and the cane behind him and his tools in his hands,’ says Carl. ‘He looks like he means business. My grandfather worked on plantations in the 1950s as a foreman, so this really means something to me.’ In this work, the aim is to rehumanise the people listed on the papers.

Among the commodities produced by enslaved labour on the Caribbean plantations, the most common and high-value were sugar, coffee and tobacco. The British developed a real taste for these colonial goods. Other imports were cotton for textiles, and mahogany and rosewood for making furniture.

‘When I lived in the West Indies as a child, I remember seeing china and mahogany furniture from these times in houses I visited, so I can really connect with this,’ says Carl.

A large proportion of Peter Thellusson’s investments were in sugar. He financed planters, shipped their produce and insured their cargoes and ships. This sculpture highlights these seemingly benign commodities, which, although products of brutality, hugely impacted the tastes of the English and the country’s trading patterns.

The transatlantic slave trade was hugely lucrative. It enabled those businessmen involved to accrue fortunes and the ability to purchase great country estates and town properties. Thellusson used his profits to buy the Brodsworth estate in 1791. This magnificent property is in stark contrast to the small huts that enslaved people typically lived in on plantations, as highlighted in Carl’s sculpture.

Even after abolition in 1833–34, the money kept pouring in as enslavers were compensated with millions of pounds (the equivalent of billions today) for their loss of ‘property’. The enslaved labourers received nothing and had to continue working as unpaid apprentices for four more years.

‘The whole piece is held together in a frame because there is so much detail – topiary, flowers climbing up the house, the slave shack to the right. I’ve added a lot of texture,’ says Carl. This sculpture explores the idea of legacy and the inheritance of wealth and cultural identity.

Charles Sabine Thellusson, who inherited Brodsworth many years after the abolition of slavery, did not inherit any properties in the Caribbean and had no direct links to enslavement. However, the wealth that he inherited, which paid for the building of the new hall and the laying out of the gardens, had its roots in the slave trade. There are belongings on display – such as furniture, sugar bowls and coffee cups – that remind us of the demand for the Caribbean commodities produced by the labour of the enslaved.

This sculpture considers how knowledge of the transatlantic slave trade is recorded and retained, and how memory alters and blurs over time. It questions how (and who) remembers the past, and how we can learn from the objects around us.

‘The pile of books in this sculpture sits right up on the plinth,’ says Carl. ‘It’s heavy – all the sculptures are – as there are so many layers of metalwork and wire. I cover them all in chrome spray when I’ve finished and they look polished and fragile, but are really robust.’ This sculpture explores the nature of changing perceptions and memory, and asks how we should remember and tell the story of this part of the estate’s history.