Frances Carlile’s installation in Canterbury Cathedral really caught my imagination – a tiny flotilla of ships made from organic finds – leaves, twigs, feathers…It’s something about the play on scale – the vast chamber of the Cathedral, the tiny cathedral-like sails of these tiny boats.
It’s also partly the sense of quest, of journeying that has always drawn me to the image of the boat. The sense of a new beginning, of an Odyssey.
The delicacy of these little works of art reminds me of Tracey Emin’s beautiful addition of 63 tiny bronze sculptures of birds to the streets of Sydney:
In opposition to so much public art, she observed: “It’s not heavy. It’s not oppressive. It’s not macho. It’s not domineering. It’s not demanding. I’m not taking up anybody’s space by what I’m doing. It’s giving something.”
Birds and boats are two images that feature prominently in the imaginative landscape of one of my favourite poets, Emily Dickinson. I could have chosen the magnificent poem ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’ but I will conclude this short voyage as we began, with ‘Wild Nights – Wild Nights!’ and the metaphor of the boat:
