The Ship references an unfinished familial project in the form of a 17-metre wooden boat frame located in North Queensland. This conspicuously absent “boat” has no hull, sea, nor captain, and is instead conjured as a curious intermedial and transhistorical world. Presented as a portal into the boat’s contextual/colonised landmass and a ‘tropical gothic’ realm, the artwork becomes an allegory for historical objects persisting over time and space. The myriad meanings associated with ‘ships’ begs a question of context and subjectivity; within the violent construction of so-called Australia it represents a fractured colonial inheritance, at once personal and societal. Beyond this, a romanticism lies within ships or boats as an heterotopian world upon an unknowable sea.

Utilising expanded cinema and cues from ‘The Ship of Theseus’, this work constitutes an attempt to finish building my grandfather's 39-year-old unfinished boat - the artwork thus becomes its spectral fiction. My grandfather intended to build this massive 17m long, 9 meter wide boat for my grandmother before her death, upon which the boat was never finished come his own death years later. The love story is held up as a Sisyphean futility and full of potential within this cinematic sculptural ghost. 

The skeletal wooden boat frame left behind in the ship yard had only a keel and some ribs. No hull had been constructed over the 40 years that it waited with his grandchildren climbing over it. This source material has generated a series of works under the umbrella of “The Ship” - given a name bigger than a boat, for all that it holds.

Please see here for elaborations on Time Theory and The Ship.

Utilises:
Field recording, 16 mm film (Bolex, contact printing, optical printing, hand processing), sound samples/recordings.

For:
16mm short film; kinetic 16mm film sculpture and immersive installation; cinematic score & vinyl release, ambisonic sound for installation.