Joy of Krill

As part of my ongoing work around the Discovery Expedition of 1924-27 I have been thinking a lot about krill.  The Expedition was investigation the sustainability of the South Atlantic whale fishery (spoiler: it wasn’t sustainable) by looking at the whole ecology of the whale food chain/environment.  It was groundbreaking research for lots of reasons, but the importance of the …

All Mortal Greatness is But Disease exhibition sho

The Shetland Stations

A question I am often asked about my textile work is “How long did that take to make?”. A common answer (depending on the piece) is “between a fortnight and ten years”. The work I was commissioned to make by the Scottish Maritime Museum (SMM) and their exhibition All Mortal Greatness is But Disease is a good example of that. …

Baffin Bay

Arctic Ventures: forgotten stories of Scottish Whaling

The Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther, Fife, is a delightful labyrinth of a place, located in a range of harbourfront buildings. Spending a long ‘Meet the Artist’ Weekend after the opening of my exhibition Arctic Ventures: forgotten stories of Scottish Whaling the most common comment from visitors arriving at the Whaling Gallery where the exhibition was, was ‘It’s much bigger …

ReCover, commemorative harpoon cover at Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. Front

ReCover, Commemorative Harpoon Cover

I don’t drink, so I can’t blame this project on a drunk DM, just a moment of madness! Hi, I hope all is as good as can be expected with you at the moment.  I have a possibly daft question for you.  What would your reaction be to a suggestion that I want to make a big, embroidered cover for …

Sampling and making the Utility For Food Panel

The Utility of Whales

It feels a little strange writing this. In my work plan for Scoresby’s Arctic (long before the exhibition even had that title) high on my to do list for just before the exhibition was due to open in May 2020 was the task of writing a blog about the one large textile panel that I was making specially for the …

1820 edition of An Account of the Arctic Regions

Scoresby’s Arctic. It’s all about the whale!

My co-curator Fiona turned to me and said, ‘This isn’t an exhibition about Moby-Dick you know’.  I had bought a copy of the book for possible display in the exhibition, one of my 50 odd versions, the one that laid open flat best.  ‘But it is for me’, I replied. ‘I found William Scoresby through Moby-Dick.’ This is all about …

Engraving of Horn Sound from Scoresby's An Account of the Arctic Regions

Spitsbergen 2019

The waters around Spitsbergen are where British Arctic Whaling began. I first visited Spitsbergen (one of the islands in the Svalbard Archipelago north of Norway  in 2012 and despite a busy summer schedule I managed to visit again in the summer of 2019. I sailed from Dover, up the North Sea with a couple of stops in Norway on the …

The Leviathanic Museum (Hull), Textile

The Leviathanic Museum (Hull)

In Chapter 102 of Moby-Dick Ishmael discusses the size of sperm whales and he uses one fictional and one real example (the sperm whale skeleton at Burton Constable) for his measurements. He also explains that ‘there are skeleton authorities you can refer to’ in order to test his accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, …