WRECKED
Acrylic and silkscreen print on aluminium, 84 x 59.5cm
Wrecked is an evocative collection of imagined portraits of the ghosts of captains of ships sunk on the Goodwin Sands. The sandbank lies off the coast of Deal, Kent, and is the world’s largest ships’ graveyard with roughly two thousand wrecks littered across it.
The names of the ships are researched using using Lloyds List, the world's oldest weekly shipping news that started in1734. The name of the ship and the date on which it sunk are gilded in large letters on the top and bottom of each work. Using artistic licence, contemporaneous naval portrait paintings are reworked into Warholesque prints - transparent, frayed and ghost-like - then layered over unique sea paintings.
These one-off silkscreen-paintings pay homage to the unique tradition of the pub sign as monument to British social history, forming an allegorical body of work that references both nostalgia for lost eras and the ship as romantic symbol of adventure.