For years Montreal-based artist Shelley Miller has been creating hand-painted sugar murals designed to fall apart in the rain. Her tiled works appear in the guise of blue-and-white azulejos, a tin-glazed ceramic art. The artist frequently uses these highly-detailed works to comment on the historic link between the sugar industry and the slave trade. Her murals melt, distort and smear in the elements, showing how the sugar industry was tainted by forced labor. The gradual decay of each piece also seems to comment on how we are separated from the details of such atrocities through the steady passage of time.
Miller, according to her biography, presented work across Canada as well as India, Brazil and Australia. She earned a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1997 and a MFA from Concordia University in 2001. She has received numerous fellowships and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et lettres du Quebec and the Commonwealth Foundation.
Above image: Shelley Miller, Cargo, 2009. This mural showed at Duke and William Streets in Montreal. Miller states the work links Montreal to the historic sugar trade, and the accompanying slave trade which supported it. Here, Cargo refers to both the sugar commodities and the humans aboard the ships. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
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Detail and deterioration shots of Cargo.
Shelley Miller, Stained, 2011. The work was installed at Waddington Alley in Victoria, B.C.’s historic district, within view of the harbor.
Shelley Miller, Velocity, 2013. This mural was installed in Sydney, Australia. The mural shares a name with a historic ship used in “blackbirding,” the name for the trade of slaves between the Pacific Islands and Australia’s sugar cane fields.
Shelley Miller, The Wealth of Some and the Ruin of Others, 2008. This mural was installed in Salvador, Brazil and addresses the country’s link with the sugar and slave trades.
Mouse over this interactive image to follow Cargo’s deterioration
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