‘Turner’s Burning Hulk: Ghost Gear’. Reproducing Turner’s oil sketch ‘Seascape with Burning Hulk’ from memory in a drifting rowing boat on the river Wye. Installation with 42 drawings and river-reclaimed footballs (six images).
‘Turner’s Burning Hulk: Ghost Gear’
Turner painted his oil-sketch ‘Seascape with Burning Hulk’ in 1828. It shows a derelict warship on a murky sea with smoke pouring into an overcast sky. My work copies Turner’s painting, into a sequence of 42 separate pictures butted together in one array. These were all drawn from memory, in a rowing boat on the tidal river Wye. I used watercolour pencils in clutches of twelve onto the river-saturated paper. I cycled the pencils through a collection of twenty-one colours from an analysis of Turner’s sketch. I then drew a second series, upside down as their reflections.
Incongruously, footballs floated by, some in extreme states of dilapidation, swept backwards and forwards on the endless tide. The drawings are displayed in one array and completed with a central horizon of these depleted footballs, collected from the river as I drew.