Nautical ropes are among the most common materials you may stumble upon on the vaporetti in Venice. But there is another humble material that we can easily find anywhere else, paper.
Now, if we combine paper with nautical themes, our minds will probably conjure up the classic paper boat, a simple yet dreamy example of paper sculpture.
Art-wise Scottish self-taught sculptor and artist George Wyllie (1921-2012) took this concept to the next level when in 1989 he created a 78-foot long Paper Boat as a celebration and memento of Glasgow's declining shipbuilding industry and a tribute to the energy and skills of the people working in the docks.
"My definition of public art is art that the public can't avoid," Wyllie used to say and it was difficult to avoid seeing his boat or his other iconic pieces such as the straw locomotive.
His Paper Boat sculpture sailed along the Clyde, the Thames and the Hudson river in New York and the idea of the paper boat was resumed in Venice in 2015 when artist Vik Muniz created a giant paper boat, an installation that was left floating in the lagoon to prompt people to think about migrant drownings in the Mediterranean.
Nautical ropes and Wyllie's paper boat are the main inspiration for my new necklace: the piece is made with very simple materials – rope and one single piece of paper, cut into three smaller sections that were then folded into origami boats. I plasticized the boats by hand with a simple technique to make sure they became more solid. The choice of materials and techniques was intentionally very basic.
There is also a painting behind the necklace, "Children of the Sea" (1872) by Jozef Israëls. The painting portrays the children of a fisherman in tattered clothes and offers us a glimpse of their future. The little toy boat in the painting stands for the rigour of life at sea.
In my necklace the fragile boats are to be interpreted as powerful symbols of recurrent escapes and endless journeys that push and prompt us to sail away from the familiar confines of this world and wander through life and history, space and time.
Like Wyllie's Paper Boat they are vessels that carry the dreams and hopes of each and every one of us: we may be ordinary people going about their daily routines; creative minds trying to design an innovative piece after completing a mysterious artistic journey inwardly; we may be children eagerly looking to their future or migrants crossing the sea to find a new life away from their countries, but we are all sailing on a metaphorical sea, hoping to survive and possibly thrive. In a nutshell, as the "Paper Boat Song" by George Wyllie says, "We're all at sea in a Paper Boat".
Related articles
Rispondi