The ship represents the history and culture of the British Empire. It looms dark over the figures.
The first SS APAPA was travelling from West Africa to Liverpool when she was sunk by U96 off Point Lynas, Anglesey on 28 November 1917 with the loss of 77 passengers and crew.
It was on the second APAPA ship that our family voyaged to West Africa in 1966.
The name Apapa means arm because the port of Apapa in Lagos. It looked like an arm stretching out to sea.
My West Indian father was teaching in the University of Ife in Ibadan.
The people in the paintings are my mother and her five daughters. I have added a little boy in the colours of the Welsh flag. My mother bought us small cases and she made banana sandwiches for when we got hungry. The cases have tickets on them saying Wales to Africa.
My younger sister is carrying her favourite Topo Gigio, a toy well known at that time.
I have a passion for patchwork cloth which symbolise the coming together of the self and the making of something beautiful with the scraps. The skirts of the first two larger figures are based on patchwork skirts made in the Netherlands during the war.
The arrangement of people makes a contrast with the line of the ship and exposes how they don’t fit comfortably in the culture. There was only one culture, the Yoruba (Nigerian) culture already having been usurped by Britain.
The figures are set in front of a culture they cannot see and are formal facing the front while being centre stage.
Isabel Adonis is a mixed race artist and writer and daughter of artist and writer Denis Williams and Welsh homemaker, Catherine Alice Williams.
Isabel has had exhibitions at The Llandudno Museum, Conwy Culture Centre, Mostyn Art Gallery and online at The Weavers Factory, Uppermill.
She wrote And: a Memoir of My Mother and won the Wales Book of the Year (non-fiction section) in 2023.
