Imagine if you will the islands of Massachusetts. The long beaches of Cape Cod stretch out into the sea as a kind of last terrestrial hurrah before the wilderness of the Atlantic. They are the repository of drowned sailors and sharks, both real and imagined, and this little sculpture is their memorial.
Washed-up as it were in the tides of materials and ideas of the studio I encountered this beautiful Mermaid’s Purse, sent by the rich waters of Melville’s masterpiece The Whale…
The poor creature for which it was intended clearly could not thrive, given the strange weight of it. Yet an egg case it was, one that once floated in the Sargasso and somehow made its way along the gulf stream to the port of Liverpool.
X-ray analysis has proven impossible, so one will have to take on trust the discernment of what lies within. It appears to be an unearthly incarnation of sea and sky, fish and fowl, chimaera and true chimera…
A Mermaid’s Purse (2021)
Lead
30x8x3cm
POA
“A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board,
and is made a captive..”
-MELVILLE
[…] A Mermaid’s Purse was conceived and constructed earlier this year inventing a mythical relationship between creatures of sea and air, but also linking the distant beaches of Nantucket USA with these remote Scottish islands. […]