Where Does Your Story Begin? Explore Tracing Our Roots / Routes
In Traces and Pastimes, Ms. Hassell explores ancestry, cultural identity, memory, and time through large-scale digital collages and biodegradable flagging tape sculptures. Her work focuses on her own discovery of her family history which she can trace back to West Africa.
Inspired by film storyboarding, she incorporates personal, family, and 19th century photographs, maps, documents, and archival materials to create narratives that explore identity and nostalgia and connections to family history and pastimes.
As part of NMB’s year-long community education programme Tracing Our Roots/ Routes (TORR), Hassell’s installation takes the TORR programme to another level of community engagement. Surrounded by exhibits on slavery in Bermuda and Bermuda’s links with the West Indies and Azores, and displayed alongside Bermudian artist Bill Ming’s Family Circle, Traces and Pastimes provides an opportunity to learn about and reflect on Bermuda history, its connections to the wider Atlantic World and our own personal stories.
The exhibition is currently on display in Commissioner’s House through to June 2022.