This was a site-specific textile sculpture Refuge: Ropner’s Ghost Ship, an Arts and
Heritage commission made in response to the Preston Park Museum collections.
Refuge took
the ethereal form of a merchant ship, dramatically lit from within, to evoke
Teesside’s maritime history and, specifically, the shipbuilding legacy of the
Museum’s former owner, Robert Ropner. The work combined Welsh’s use of textiles
to evoke resonances of time, place and memory (Another Peace, 2012) with
Dixon’s use of the ship-form as a metaphoric vessel of narrative (Monopoly,
2009).
The work highlighted the historic
narrative of Robert Ropner (an ‘economic migrant’ who travelled from Germany as
a teenage orphan and subsequently became a key figure in Teesside’s shipping
and ship-building industries) as a method of questioning contemporary attitudes
to immigration and the ‘value’ of migrants, as revealed by the Brexit vote to
leave the EU. The multiple textile banners that make up Refuge exploit
the varying luminosity of different fabrics (cotton organdie and cotton
interfacing) to reveal the ghostly form of the Ropner merchant vessel Somersby when illuminated by
ultra-violet light.
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