SHIP, 2019
For Morecambe Bay

In 2019 I was commissioned by the Morecambe Bay Partnership to create a sculpture that reflecting the local seafaring traditions including that of St Patrick having been said to have landed at nearby Heysham Head.

Symbolically positioned on the boundary between land and sea, benefitting from dramatic backdrops of the tides, horizon and stunning coastal sunsets, the outline of a ship's hull is mounted with two opposing figures at each end. One figure faces 'the old' - the ancient monument of St Patrick's Chapel - and looks north across the Bay which is a view, in the right conditions, where one can almost imagine oneself a millennia back in time. The other figure faces south to the ‘new’ - the industrialism of modern docks, Heysham Nuclear Power Station and wind turbines.

As well as trying to capture something of the timelessness of seafaring, the figures face different directions as a reminder that refugees go as well as come; that many of us who consider ourselves native have parents a generation or twenty generations back who were refugees themselves. In the centre of SHIP is a block of locally quarried stone designed as a place of rest and contemplation. I hope SHIP is somewhere where the meeting of the land and the vastness of the sea, and the meeting of past and present, will open our hearts to what we all have in common as humans – over time and now in the present.