United Nations
In 2010, I was approached by the New York chief of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Simone Monasebian, who offered me an ambassadorial role at the United Nations. It was felt that through my art work I could help raise awareness of current issues and inspire others to take action – the key issues being human trafficking, prison conditions, violence against women, drug abuse, terrorism and corruption.
My first artwork for the United Nations was presented at the Human Trafficking conference in Luxor, Egypt, in December 2010, and was the focal point for my speech about Human Trafficking. Over three days of intense debate the world’s most influential hammered out standards for the eradication of slavery and human suffering.
The art work I presented was entitled From Fujian Province to Morecambe Bay… I made it in response to a harrowing story that made the news in the UK in 2004 that affected me deeply. Twenty three Chinese workers harvesting cockles drowned against a rising tide on the shores of Morecambe Bay. Within days, the incident had escalated into a nationwide scandal involving criminal gang masters and the exploitation of illegal workers in Britain today.
I decided to create an imagined portrait of one of the Chinese workers who died in the tragedy, built up from chains. Chains are an obvious metaphor for slavery, but also because the female victims were identified from their jewellery. The piece takes the form of a coin as the workers’ lives had been reduced to a commodity – the 240,000 Yuan being the bonded debt owed by each worker to their gang masters.
The United Nations also commissioned two portraits, of Frederick Douglass and Susan B Anthony, which now hang in their headquarters in New York. Frederick Douglass was one of the most eminent human-rights leaders of the 19th century, the first black citizen to hold high rank in the US government; Susan B Anthony was a social reformer who played a pivotal role in America’s suffragette movement. Her work helped pave the way for the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.
CNN – United Nations Interview
Pearly Queens – Frederick Douglass