BOATS, BOATS & MORE BOATS

One morning - four or five years ago - I woke with a prompt to get out of bed and start making paper boats. Without questioning the whys and wherefores of this instruction, I did as bidden. Boat-folding quickly became an easy and welcome daily ritual, a way to steady myself and find focus. The activity took on some of the qualities of a meditation, a way to still my thoughts and dissipate the restlessness and anxiety I was experiencing at the time. I'd spend an hour or so at my dining room table each morning before going into my studio for my day's work. 

A little way into the process, I came across a marvelous poem by Seamus Heaney titled The Flight Path in which he had written 

                             ‘… A dove rose in my breast
                             every time my father’s hands came clean
                             with a paper boat between them, ark in air,
                             the lines of it as taut as a pegged tent:
                             high-sterned, splay-bottomed, the little pyramid
                             at the centre every bit as hollow
                             as a part of me that sank because it knew
                             the whole thing would go soggy once you launched it…’

Clearly, I was going to have to waterproof my humble vessels!

I came up with a new design with simpler, tighter folds and tried applying gesso. For obvious reasons, this wasn’t going to work. I consider making them out of paper clay but that would mean I'd need a kiln. . . Then one day I went through to town to the kitchen shop to look for a potato peeler - very prosaic - and whilst pottering about amongst fancy silicon bakeware and mundane kitchen gadgets I spotted a rack of recyclable picnic plates made out of bamboo. Bamboo? Of course! I went home with a couple of packs and put this new material to the test. It was perfect. I mixed wood glue in with the gesso to seal and reinforce the joints and several weeks later had painted six or seven layers of gesso onto about 220 boats. I was sleeping like a babe at night and my unnameable anxiety had disappeared.

Why am I telling you about these boats? Well, in part because I had just spent time on a real one - the Caselberg Trust’s Breaksea Girl/Fiordland Residency had happened not long before I embarked on making this bamboo flotilla – and in part because one day it dawned on me that all along – quite without knowing it - I had been making the boats to take down to Antarctica. They would become the cast in a series of underwater ArtScience films and continue to feature in related - and unrelated - projects years down the track. Boats in various iterations remain an essential 'character' or 'motif' in my work. 

That first flotilla of boats gave rise to various unexpected Antarctic ArtScience 'happenings'. Aside from the glorious, dreamlike sequences we staged and captured on film beneath the sea ice in 2008, these small bamboo boats came to play an important role in terms of two season's scientific research, outperforming some of the more sophisticated scientific equipment in the collection of volcanic sediment on the ocean floor.  Along with various carefully designed and meticulously positioned 'sediment arrays', researchers left seven of my boats on the ocean floor at Explorers Cove, New Harbor. Two years later (in 2010), divers returned to examine and uplift the arrays only to find they were nowhere to be seen. . . The boats, however, were exactly where they had been left and it became quickly apparent that they had more-than-adequately accomplished the task intended for the much more sophisticated scientific equipment. A wonderful - and slightly humorous - example of art offering service to science! 

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Bamboo boats weigh next to nothing; down on the ice, I was able to stack them one inside the other and pop them into my backpack along with my cameras and various pieces of sound recording equipment. They accompanied me everywhere we went; I photographed them in every conceivable terrain. Boats are, of course, an integral part of Antarctica's - and, indeed, most nations' - history and a fitting metaphor for our common/uncommon journey. Metaphorically, they symbolize our solo and communal voyage.

ASCEND, DESCEND

Oil on Paper

2011

SOLD

A CONSTELLATION OF BOATS    |    NIGHT

Oil on Paper

2011

 

A CONSTELLATION OF BOATS    |   DAY

Oil on Paper

2011

SCREENSHOT of LOVE THE WATERS (movie) 

BOAT MANDALA (An ongoing edition - I will make these to order)

100% Cotton paper

2012

Detail 

DEEP SILENCE

ALONE  ALL ONE
Pencil & Oil on Paper
2012

RETURN

Charcoal & Pastel on Paper

2010

STORM WARNING 

Charcoal & Pastel on Paper

2011

HIDDEN DEPTHS

Oil on Paper

2009

(A)DRIFT (detail)

1000 wall-mounted paper boats with silent film projection

2010

A(D)RIFT (stills photograph from the film A Prayer for Fukushima)
1000 wall-mounted paper boats with film projection
Mudra (hand-dancing) - Kate Alterio
Soundtrack - Chris Tokalon
2011