Walk To The Ferry - Triptych
Walk To The Ferry - Mixed Media Assemblages
WALK TO THE FERRY
This work features images inspired strangely enough by the futility of fishing with drop lines from the pier at Broughty Ferry as a young boy. Hours spent dangling a line into the water hoping that something would bite. Most of the time the hooks were baited with nothing more than homemade milk bottle cap lures, sparkling in the waters below the pier.
What I didn’t know was that what I was ‘catching’ was a love of the coastline. The stories of the old fishermen, the relics of Dundee’s whaling past in the Castle Museum, and the colour and mood of the changing river that would be a main part of my artistic vision.
The homemade fishing tackle is replaced by unusual looking lines, the main frames are made to symbolise the oars, harpoons, and net mending needles, the tools of the area. The catches are not so much the sought after fish, but driftwood and weed fish, relics and tokens of the past, and the usual catch of nothing but a few shore crabs!
The objects are supported in the triptych form by the background of the Tay and the distant fife shore, which when we were very young may well have been abroad.
