The work
Books to Sea, on display at Hull History
Centre is part of a larger exhibition that spans across
various venues in Hull. The exhibition shows the works made during my residency
at the Maritime Historical Studies Centre (MHSC, based at Blaydes House) part
of the University of Hull. The residency has been funded by a grant by the
Leverhulme Trust.
During
my time in Hull I had access to the collections and archives of the MHSC, the
Maritime Museum and the HHC. These collections and the very few visible
remnants scattered across the city (what is left of the old docks, yards and
factories) were my main window into the industry of over 200 years ago. I
focused mainly, but not exclusively, on books concerned with the whaling period
of the city, approximately 1776 to 1867.
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Ocean Passages for the world |
Narratives
abound. They range from the prosaic and anecdotal descriptions of the voyage
and the vicissitudes of the hunt, to more philosophical reflections about life
at sea. I feel as if the boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and legend are
intricately entwined. I purposely tried not to get too entangled on individual
stories. Not because I wanted to remain detached but perhaps I worried that it
would be too seductive a path and it would stop me from trying to explore the
bigger picture. I was more interested in a sort of ‘texture’ of it all: the
texture of the sea and of whaling as viewed from a distance. Distance can act
as an inverted lens that turns something really large into a manageable
miniature, easier to explore. In this case, time was the distancing agent. And
each logbook or journal became a miniature model of the whole period.
I
love old books, especially the ones that show their age, the decaying grandeur
of their leather covers and gold embossing. I like the contradiction between
the assertiveness of their information, they exhale an air of inherent truth and
the fact that in many cases that information is obsolete, incorrect or incomplete.
One of my favourite books is Ocean
Passages for the World. – the full stop is actually embossed on the cover.
The book contains a list and description of all ocean routes between different parts
of the globe. This particular edition is from 1923 and it is at the MHSC
library. That particular full stop says to me “this is it, these are all the
ocean passages there will ever be”, like reassuring an ultimate authority and
timelessness.
I
have spent long periods of time in the library perusing through all these
books, about whales, whaling and the ocean. Seduced by the elaborate covers I
started taking pencil rubbings of the embossed titles and designs, an art
technique also known as frottage. I
thought of the book as a ship in which to sail through the whaling past. Perhaps
too obvious a metaphor, I know, but from the cosiness of a library is the only
way we can ever board those extinct whaler ships. The described seas are but a
mental place of the past, the whalers and their prey mere ghosts. But that is
the funny thing, the sea in these books is all the more powerful because it is
a reflection of the sea still out there,
as inhospitable, unfixable and unknowable today as it was then, despite our
inexhaustible attempts to fix it or map it, despite any full stops insinuating the opposite. The same impossibility of
ultimate knowing applies to our understanding of whales. Physical up-close
encounters with living whales are certainly scarce. For most of us on shore,
whales will remain endlessly fascinating but forever out of grasp.
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Some of the panels on display in the History Centre arcade |
Progressively,
my attention was drawn away from the figurative embossed designs on the books
and towards the textured covers. They suddenly reminded me of the sea glimpsed
from a plane window: a static sea, opaque, solid and impenetrable as mountains.
The sea from the pages somehow had filtered out to the outer skin of the book. In
some respects however, this literary sea
is in constant flux, as much as the physical
sea is. Because despite having been set in print, the text is exposed to our
interpretation today, and those interpretations change it and make it flow. I
see the surface of sea as a metaphor of history, a fluid and unstable layer separating
two great substances (water and air in the case of the sea, past and present in
that of history). Past and present are intangible concepts held in a delicate
balance, which is constantly being rewritten.
The
rubbings of the covers appear to me as topographies of these sea-skins,
book-ships. Sometimes the rubbings revealed features I had not noticed before
on the books, their scars emerged. Hull
Whaling Relics is a small booklet from the collection at the HHC. In its
pencil rubbing the signs of ageing, institutional stamps and cataloguing tags
are the only features of an otherwise uniform surface. This particular work can
act perhaps as a poignant reflection of the position of whaling heritage within
Hull cultural landscape, obscured and hidden in archives and libraries as
oppose to visible and celebrated alongside the fishing heritage.
The
works at the HHC show scaled-up prints of the pencil rubbings. I wanted to
experiment with changing the scale, to accentuate the surface details and evoke
even more an idea of the book as a physical place (another book is brilliantly
titled The Physical Geography of the Sea,
and its Meteorology). They are an invitation to the viewers to get up-close
and after exploring the surface, perhaps venture into the whaling section of
the library and allow themselves to get entangled in those captivating
narratives from not so long ago.