Lydiat- a-maidens-voyage

A Maiden’s Voyage

Chelsea Caf Project is pleased to present Display #15, A Maiden's Voyage, an exhibition of artworks relating to the limited edition book and dvd of the same title by CCW PhD student Anne Lydiat. The project seeks to find an alternative account of the gendered space of the ship, moving away from the traditional stereotypes of the female on-board as figureheads, prostitutes and that even in the 21st century the ship is still called 'she'. By excavating historical examples, Lydiat demonstrates how women have been written out of this perceived masculine preserve, and in so doing investigates issues of historiography and perceptions of truth. There will be a launch of the limited edition book and DVD of the same title at Chelsea Caf at 2pm on Thursday 2 July 2015.

A Maiden's Voyage is accompanied by images of two women from Lydiat's research including Louise Arner Boyd shown on-board the Veslekari. Boyd was the first woman to venture into Arctic regions where only men had preceded her. In 1926, her love for photography and her fascination with the stories about the first Arctic expeditions prompted Boyd to charter a boat, the Hobby, for a six-week maiden voyage to the Arctic Circle. It was the first of many increasingly daring polar ventures that she financed and directed, bringing back photographs and survey data that resulted in detailed maps of previously unknown regions. The portrait of Beata is an artistic reconstruction of a woman of about 25 years old and thought to have probably been the wife or sister of one of the crew. Her remains were salvaged in 1961 from on-board the warship Vasa that had set sail on her maiden voyage and then sank in Stockholm Harbour on 10th August 1628.

Beata

Beata

Anne Lydiat has exhibited both nationally and internationally for over thirty years. Since 2002 she has lived onboard an old Medway Coaster moored on the River Thames. Her PhD research asks, if the ship is a paradigm of a Heterotopia, how can gendered art practices inform discourses in relation to this transgressive space? An essential context for her practice-led research is that both her home and studio are on a floating, fully navigable vessel. A fluvial existence where the constantly changing physical relation to the shore, being in between and on the edge both as a physical and conceptual margin, denotes the moving boundary of the heterotopic ship in time and space. As a rite of separation from her liminal state, and to create a space of agency, in 2013 she sailed to the Arctic Circle to follow in the wake of the Louise Arner Boyd. She made drawings, kept a Ship’s Log and filmed and photographed the 'wake' of the moving ship, making permanent the transient presence of her own rite of passage and those of women voyagers from maritime history.

Further details can be found online at [email protected] and chelseapublicprogramme.wordpress.com

About The Caf Project:
The Caf Project is a series of displays of work by students and staff from Chelsea College of Arts. These changing displays are a chance to see some of the talent here at Chelsea from across a diverse range of disciplines. The series is curated by Sin ad Bligh in collaboration with CHELSEA space (opposite) as part of the Public Programme. For more information please contact Sin ad Bligh at [email protected] or in person at CHELSEA space.

Maiden Voyage logos

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