Vessels
Vessels – Terror, 2025Vessels – Margaret, 2025
Vessels – Wanderer, 2025Borosilicate glass, harbour water from Mosman Bay, salvaged wharf timber from Sydney harbour, bronze, brass, electricity, 24v led light globe, electrical cable, wire, dimmer. Commissioned by Mosman Art Gallery.
Vessels reflects on whaling as the first globalised extractive industry and origin point for the still-unbroken practice of mining ancient and living beings in pursuit of energy.
In the 1800s, the hunt for light set humans into the bodies of whales. Across Australia, including Mosman Bay, whales were pursued in vast numbers for their blubber, which was rendered down into pale, viscous oil to illuminate the early industrial world. It was this living oil that burned in lamps before fossil fuels and electrical grids. Under its glow the transition from living biological to ancient geological energy sources unfolded, one form of life shining a path toward the extraction of another.
The materials of the work directly embed and explore this lineage. The sculptural forms suggest an object dredged from the deep, perhaps a lure, a body, or an anchor, composed of hundreds of blown-glass vessels sealed with water from Mosman Bay. Salvaged wharf timber from Sydney harbour, eroded by time, tides and molluscs, is paired with industrial bronze ship hardware. Contemporary electricity circulates throughout the sculptures, its light calibrated to the warm chromatic register of a whale-oil flame, collapsing temporal boundaries between past and present energies.
The body of work is titled Vessels, a reference to both the maritime apparatus and the whale itself as a site of extraction, energy, commerce and time. Each sculpture in the series takes its name from a notorious whaling vessel once active in Mosman Bay; Terror, Margaret and Wanderer.
The question of energy is among the most vital for the future of the planet and humanity. Yet, historical and current forms of energy production have led to environmental destruction on a global scale. Vessels considers the ecological and cultural consequences of human incursion into the deep sea, positioning the whale as both witness and medium within the ongoing energy transition.
