A birthday treat turned into a useful opportunity to extend my practice and find new sources of inspiration. In May 2025 I set sail on a cruise entitled British Isles and European Delights. An unusual itinerary leaving and returning to Liverpool sailing anticlockwise around Great Britain calling at St Peter Port in Guernsey, Honfleur in France, Ijmuiden for Amsterdam, then …
The main aim of the Discovery Oceanographic Expedition (1924-27) was to investigate the sustainability of the South Atlantic Whale Fishery. As part of this there needed to be an understanding of the marine ecosystem that sustained the whales. It was known that krill (mostly Antarctic Krill Euphausia superba) were the main food source for these whales but it was not …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
August 1st 2019 was Herman Melville’s 200th birthday. I celebrated it at Burton Constable Hall, near Hull which was probably one of the most ‘Moby-Dick’ places in the UK at that time. Not only is there a sperm whale skeleton mentioned in Moby-Dick there, but there was also my exhibition of British influences in Moby-Dick. It was great …
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, …
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was a Norfolk-based doctor, polymath and author. Herman Melville owned several of Browne’s books and admired his work and his whimsical writing style, which influenced Melville’s own style. Browne wrote about sperm whales in his myth busting book Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Book of Vulgar Errors, (1646) having seen a sperm whale stranded on the coast of Norfolk. …