Graham Fagen

Graham Fagen has released a limited edition giclée print ‘Nancy, Bell, Roselle (The ships that Robert Burns booked passages to Jamaica on) (2022) for the National Galleries of Scotland.

Robert Burns (1759 – 1796) had made plans to start a new life in Jamaica to begin employment on a sugar plantation worked by slaves. This print depicts the ships that he was booked to travel on, sketched from original adverts from 1786. Six years later he wrote the powerful anti-slavery song Slave’s Lament, adopting the voice of a slave captured in Senegal and enslaved in Virginia.

This song inspired Fagen’s video installation of the same name shown at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery along with the original prints in 2017, and most recently in the New Arrivals exhibition, having entered the collection in 2020.