About

about

AOUS was initiated in 2018 by Kayle Brandon and Angela Piccini. They use social and process-led practice to explore the relationships, places, and material traces arising from events that took place from 1576-78 – when Martin Frobisher was commissioned by Elizabeth I to locate the Northwest Passage to China. Frobisher’s ships instead landed up in Nunavut in what is now northern Canada. This event catalyzed British colonisation of the Americas.

Our name, Association of Unknown Shores, comes from Queen Elizabeth I’s naming the land Meta Incognita – the unknown limits, or shore. We instead position ‘unknown shores’ as seeds to future known relationships in postcolonial world-making.

AOUS brings together artists, activists, educators, and community members collaborating across Bristol, Iqaluit, and Plymouth to work with events that violently and permanently entangled the shores of England and Nunavut:

The illegitimate renaming of Inuit land by the English in a series of possession rituals
Gold fraud enabled by alchemy
200 tons of stone mined in Nunavut by Forest of Dean Freeminers were brought to England and built into Dartford’s town walls
Three Inuit hostages brought to Bristol in late September 1577. The man died on 8 November and the woman on 12 November. They were buried within the grounds of St Stephen’s Church. Their true names are known only to their descendants in the Inuit Nunangat. The woman’s baby was taken to London, where he died and was buried at St Olave’s Church.
English oak deposited on Kodlunarn Island
A narwhal tusk gifted to Queen Elizabeth I
A Freeminer’s wicker basket buried in permafrost
In 1594, Frobisher died in Plymouth Sound and his heart is interred at St Andrew’s Minster Church

AOUS has been working with St Stephen’s Church as part of the church’s ongoing work to reconcile its role in these colonial traumas.

AOUS has been generously funded by University of Bristol (2018-19) and Arts Council England (2021-23), with additional support from University of Plymouth (2021-23).

Collaborating Artists

Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Janet Pitsulaaq Brewster, Jamie Griffiths, Kathy Hinde, David Hopkinson, Kelly J Jones, Norah Kennedy, Cleo Lake, Sophie Mellor, Nathan Taylor

Acknowledgements

Juste Adomaviciute

Arnolfini

Art of a Fine Nature

Spencer Bailey

Allison Bain

Noah Bottrell

Brigstow Institute

Shirley Chen

Bianca Gendreau

Sue Giles

Stacey Girling-Christie

Lisa Graves

Ellen Hamilton

David Hopkinson

Heather Igloliorte

Mark Igloliorte

Mark Jackson

Evan Jones

Jessica Kotierk

Caroline Marchand

Sophie Mellor

Elaine Mormon

Phil Owen

Sefryn Penrose

Joanne Prince

Alysa Procida

Karen Ryan

Lisa Scantlebury

Fiona Scawn

St Stephen’s Church, Bristol

Mike Still

Ben Thomas

Kika Thorne

Christine Tootoo

Georgiana Uhlyarik

Lucy Woollett

Jonathan Wright

Auger, Reginald, et al. 2001. Decentering Icons of History: Exploring the Archaeology of the Frobisher Voyages and Early European-Inuit Contact. In Carolyn Podruchny and Germain Warkentin (eds) Decentering the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective 1500-1700. Toronto: U of T Press.

Best, George. 1578. A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie, for the Finding of a Passage to Cathaya. London.

Brenchley Rye, William (ed.) 1865. England as seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First. London

Brody, Hugh. 1975. The People’s Land. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Chaplin, Joyce E. 2001. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676. Cambridge, Mass

Cheshire, Neil et al. 1980. Frobisher’s Eskimos in England. Archivaria 10

Collinson, Richard (ed.). 1867. The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher. Hakluyt Society, Works, 1st set. 38.

Eber, Dorothy Harley. 2008. Encounters on the Passage: Inuit meet the Explorers. Toronto: U of T Press.

Ehrenreich, Robert. 1998. Mining, colonialism and culture contact. In Social Approaches to an Industrial Past: : The Archaeology and Anthropology of Mining

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296329944/download

Fox, F F. 1910. Adams’s Chronicle of Bristol. Bristol.

Igloliorte, Heather. 2019. “‘Hooked Forever on Primitive Peoples’: James Houston and the Transformation of ‘Eskimo Handicrafts’ to Inuit Art,” Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism, Elisabeth Harney and Ruth Phillips (eds). Durham: Duke University Press, 62-90

Inuit Art Quarterly journal, https://www.inuitartfoundation.org/inuit-art-quarterly

Latimer, John. 1903. History of the Merchant Venturers of the City of Bristol. Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith https://archive.org/stream/historyofsociety00latiuoft/historyofsociety00latiuoft_djvu.txt

McGhee, Robert. 2001. The Arctic Voyages Of Martin Frobisher: An Elizabethan Adventure. London: British Museum Press.

Richardson, Robbie. 2018. The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. University of Toronto Press.

Rowley, Susan. 1993. Frobisher Mikisanut: Inuit Accounts of the Frobisher Voyages. In W. Fitzhugh and J. Olin (eds), Archaeology of the Frobisher Voyages. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Settle, Dionyse. 1577. A True Reporte of the Laste Voyage into the West and Northwest Regions. London

Sturtevant, William C. and Quinn, David Beers. 1987. This New Prey: Eskimos in Europe, 1567, 1576 and 1577. In Christian F. Feest (ed.) Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays. Aachen: Herodot.

Symons, Thomas H. B. (ed.) 1999. 2 vols. Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery – Martin Frobisher’s Arctic Expeditions, 1576-78. Hull: Museum of Civilisation.

Tagaq, Tanya. 2018. Split Tooth. Viking Press.

Thrush, Coll. 2016. Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire. Princeton: Yale University Press

Vaughan, Alden T. 2006. Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776. Cambridge: Cambridge UP

Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

about

Collaborating Artists

Acknowledgements

Further Reading