Tanker, tinny, trawler or pirate ship, the boat is one of Australia’s most enduring obsessions. Float observes this country’s evolving relationship with its watery environs and the particular (and peculiar) means employed to discover, traverse, take pleasure and seek to conquer them. This exhibition celebrates the figurative and metaphorical potential of the boat in contemporary Australian visual arts.
The boats in this exhibition are fragile and fleeting, they are epic in their construction and capacity to tell a bold imaginative tale, they refer to the characters and events of a particular history, those which defined us as an emerging nation and a mythology that has been long perpetuated and only more recently broadened to acknowledge other(s) histories.
The boats speak of intimate dramas and personal experience played out on minute scale alongside those that resonate across an ocean.
Image above: Kendal Murray, Unreal Ideal, 2007. Mixed media assemblage, 8.5 x 9 x 9.5 cm
Image below: John Turier, Pasha and four tugs (detail) 2007. Timber, silk, wire and synthetic polymer paint, 5 pieces, dimensions variable
Museum of Art and Culture Lake Macquarie, 1A First Street, Booragul 2284 View in Google Maps
1A First Street , Booragul 2284