Helen Stokes - Norwich Masters Showcase 2023
An A6 zine is open to the final double page spread, which shows a photograph of the original ship’s bell recovered from the Gloucester shipwreck opposite the names of ships operated by the Royal African Company in the year the ship sank.

For my final MA project I created a new visual identity for an exhibition of artefacts from The Gloucester shipwreck, as shown at Norwich Castle Museum in summer 2023.

The work included designing a new logo, catalogue, alternative exhibition guide (zine) and a poster for the show. I based my design on the links between the Duke of York, on board the ship when it sank in 1682, and the English slave trade. (The Duke was governor of and principal shareholder in the Royal African Company which at the time had a monopoly on the English trade in enslaved people.)

The zine cover is black and white and features the title ‘The Gloucester 1682’ running up the left side. A bottle fills the other side of the cover and appears to tip into the text.

Without undermining the beauty of the barnacle-encrusted wine bottles recovered from the wreck site, the designs draw attention to the activities of the Royal African Company. Inside the bottle, a cartouche from a 1675 map printed by John Seller shows the Royal African Company’s elephant and castle crest and a crude depiction of two African men.

My design practice is research-led. The logotype uses a font based on the Fell Types, a contemporary typeface created for the Oxford University Press in the decade before The Gloucester’s final journey. I have experimented with layouts in the exhibition catalogue and zine, incorporating images and artwork that appear to have sunk to the sea floor, with diagonal captions listing underwater. The names of some of the RAC slave ships operating in 1682 appear in the waves of the catalogue header, and as logotypes in the zine, as visual reminders of entirely different journeys made by sea in the year The Gloucester sank.

The catalogue cover is white with a blue-green bottle sat on the title ‘The Gloucester 1682’. Inside the bottle is a cartouche containing a crude etching of two African men.
The exhibition catalogue is open to a double page spread revealing a page of text facing a photograph of a barnacle-encrusted wine bottle on the opposite page.
An exhibition poster is shown outside in an A-frame on a sunny day. The poster has two large green-blue wine bottles and the title ‘The Gloucester 1682’ is at the bottom.

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