I've been focusing on preparations for a funding bid for Estuary Dialogues recently so my drawings and other practical work have taken a bit of a back seat. Going back into my studio last week, I was playing around with some ideas when I picked up a box of these small clear bottles with stoppers, that I had ordered from a company who make containers for collecting insect specimens for my last project, Adventureland.
There is something about the scale of these bottles that I liked so I thought about using them in the ED project. On a very thin strip of tracing paper I began to draw a reductive version of a prison hulk. These hulks were originally naval ships but were decommissioned and used to house prisoners offshore in the 1700's to late 1800's. Conditions onboard were grim according to records in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and the Guildhall Museum in Rochester. Prisoners were poorly fed and clothed, had to do long days labouring shackled together and disease was rife. Often prisoners were sent to America and then Australia as convicts.
I wanted to draw these hulks on a tiny scale, with fragility and attention to detail which was quite challenging. I then put them inside the bottles reminiscent of old ships in bottles. I like the fact that the drawings become incarcerated; both a nod to the historic version of events but also a reversal of events. Instead of being the prison, the hulks have now become the imprisoned.
I've been focusing on preparations for a funding bid for Estuary Dialogues recently so my drawings and other practical work have taken a bit of a back seat. Going back into my studio last week, I was playing around with some ideas when I picked up a box of these small clear bottles with stoppers, that I had ordered from a company who make containers for collecting insect specimens for my last project, Adventureland.
There is something about the scale of these bottles that I liked so I thought about using them in the ED project. On a very thin strip of tracing paper I began to draw a reductive version of a prison hulk. These hulks were originally naval ships but were decommissioned and used to house prisoners offshore in the 1700's to late 1800's. Conditions onboard were grim according to records in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and the Guildhall Museum in Rochester. Prisoners were poorly fed and clothed, had to do long days labouring shackled together and disease was rife. Often prisoners were sent to America and then Australia as convicts.
I wanted to draw these hulks on a tiny scale, with fragility and attention to detail which was quite challenging. I then put them inside the bottles reminiscent of old ships in bottles. I like the fact that the drawings become incarcerated; both a nod to the historic version of events but also a reversal of events. Instead of being the prison, the hulks have now become the imprisoned.
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