'Held Tenderly' by Sharon Walters

Join Royal Museums Greenwich's Curator of the Atlantic, Dr Nydia A. Swaby, to explore the forms tenderness takes in Held Tenderly. The large-scale collage was created by artist Sharon Walters during her Caird Research Fellowship at the Museum in 2024-2025.

This artwork forms part of The Many Invincible Ones, a display in the Queen's House that responds to a historic photograph in Royal Museums Greenwich's collection. The image dates from 1875 and depicts formerly enslaved children aboard HMS Flying Fish in Madagascar. Created in the context of violence, the photograph is also strikingly tender: the children lean into and hold one another, and Walters works with these gestures of closeness and care. 

Bringing together historic photographs of African women with images of crustaceans from the vessel’s later voyages, Walters' collage reunites the children with mothers and ancestors. The talk considers how this careful looking and remaking honours the tenderness the children shared, while imagining the familial worlds from which the colonial photograph separates them.

This talk is part of a series of events taking place in the Queen's House for the Association for Art History's Art History Festival. The annual celebration sees museums, galleries and cultural venues across the UK host free talks, tours and workshops, to showcase the richness of art history.