Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander whose research-driven practice examines the historical practice of ‘blackbirding’, which is a romanticised colloquialism for the Pacific slave trade.

In Copper Archipelago 2024, the artist affirms her maternal lineage to ‘Granny’ (her great-great-grandmother) who was kidnapped from Vanuatu at the age of eight and enslaved as a house servant in 1899 for the Sydney-based Wunderlich family, renowned for the manufacture of pressed-tin ceiling panels. By bringing this familiar kind of decorative ceiling, which viewers may associate with their own home, together with the arresting form of a ship’s outer edge, Togo-Brisby speaks to her own feeling for ships as a ‘homeland’ for her dislocated and dispersed people. The artist appropriates patterns usually found on Wunderlich ceilings and adds a vernacular of charged motifs that speak to her family’s history, including relief portraits of her mother, daughter and self. Shiny Wunderlich copper tiles frame each portrait, creating a dazzling effect.

Visitors’ experience of this ceiling is inspired by that of Pacific peoples lured onto slave boats with bright trinkets. Installed in a relatively confined gallery space, Copper Archipelago requires visitors to look up to experience the work. This act replicates that of Pacific peoples enslaved in the holds of ships on three-month journeys across the Pacific, where they had no choice but to lie down, looking up at the underside of the deck.