In recent years I have been fortunate to see and photograph some of the old Arctic whaler log books held in Hull History Centre and Hull Maritime Museum. I have then used my photos to transcribe the entries. I’ve been fascinated as the individual voyages unfold, reading of the frustrations of the captain not catching whales when other ships had, the tragedies of losses …
One of the defining things about being British is our obsession about the weather. It is a safe topic of conversation and a source of constant interest. But our climate is also generally benign so it’s rarely more than an inconvenience (more of that in another post…) For the last few years an important component of my practice has been …
This is a small piece inspired by a particular aspect of arctic whaling that has interested me for a while now. British Arctic Whalers had various superstitions and traditions and the ones that interest me at the moment are those that relate to their material culture – special things that they made. In December I was privileged to be able …
I’ve used some related imagery I’ve been working on for a while to loosely illustrate this traditional song about a whaling voyage in book form. I used a combination of digital printing on fabric and fabric paint for the lyric pages. The images were made using transfer dyes, layering burnt sheer fabrics and freehand machine embroidery. The pages run in a …
A chance conversation and a trip to the whaling gallery at Hull turned my thoughts to whaling songs. A feature of the gallery at Hull is the songs that play when you enter the gallery and I finally got around to buying a cd of the songs. The one that initially appealed and inspired me most was the Greenland Fishery, …
Whaling carried on in Dundee later than any other Port in Britain because of the use of whale oil in the local jute processing industry. One of the great benefits to me of this is that Dundee has a fantastic collection of whaling photographs, of ships, whaling and the arctic locations. This is also one of the reasons that the …