This work was made for the 2022 exhibition Arctic Ventures: forgotten stories of Scottish Whaling at the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther, Fife. Early Scottish Arctic Whaling took place around Spitsbergen, an island between Norway and The North Pole. As there was a mistaken belief that Spitsbergen was linked to Greenland this was known as the Greenland Fishery whalemen referred …
I belong to the Artist’s Programme run by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. The group, run by the wonderful education department, encourages artists through a programme of workshops and regular meetings to consider issues around a range of practice related topics. Although I love the built environment of the displays there are not many objects that relate …
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 …
My artist statement currently states that “I make work inspired by Moby Dick and British Arctic Whaling, inspired by my travel and research. I am aware that this is quite a niche practice, but I carry on regardless, and for once this approach has paid off! The White Hart in Downham Market, Norfolk has been returned to its original name …
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 …
Digitally Printed textile 2014. Double-sided map of Spitsbergen, geography on the front, geology on the back.
Digitally printed freehand machine embroidered textiles, 2014. The skulls are based on ones at Tromso Polar Museum, the maps and charts relate to where those specific species can be found. They are approximately life sized.