Once Upon a Time is an evolving series of montages developed from material relating to the Anglican Church in the archives of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Francis focused specifically on material from the Anglican Church’s missionary programmes from the late 1700’s to 1950’s in what was known as the British West Indies. The material highlights the Church’s own perception of its relationship to the colonial project, and to Black and Brown people. This relationship was paradoxical, involving the propagation of so-called progressive religious instruction, vested interests and complicity in the mechanisms of colonial power. By relinquishing sole authorship, Francis invites the viewer to become an active protagonist; to interrogate and re-contextualise the material and its role in the shifting manifestation of colonialism. 

The first source of material for Francis’s montages is Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands, sometimes referred to as a “slave bible”, a heavily redacted version of the Bible printed in 1807 specifically to teach a version of Christianity to enslaved people which removed the idea of freedom. The second source is a sermon by Lord Bishop Bilbeus Porteus for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, a missionary group that supported the Church of England clergy. Finally, Francis uses photographs taken from damaged contact sheets made by photographer Bryan Heseltine under commission from the same society, edited and distributed by them as a form of propaganda. The damaged sheets become a metaphor for the shift and collapse of photographic meaning over time. 

The project presents a wider edit from Heseltine’s contact sheets, work he produced to show a more nuanced version of the West Indies. As with the “slave bible”, there is evidence of slippage in the material, inserted by Francis to amplify the mechanisms of power and control.