When I was coming up with the name of the exhibition ‘Slice of History’, I remembered there was another work of art with the name ‘Slice of…
In fact, I’d met the artist!
In May 2006,I reenacted my first solo transatlantic race (the OSTAR 2005, Plymouth UK > Newport RI) as art installation called ‘Absolute Solitude.’ I lived on my boat outside the Tate Britain gallery in London for the same number of days as it took me to sail to America.
British sculptor Richard Wilson, RA came up to my boat and we chatted.
He loved what I was doing and invited me to join him for dinner on his art installation A Slice of Reality – a work of modern art, commissioned for (and sitting by) the Millennium Dome, London.
The piece consists of a 9-metre (30 ft) sliced vertical section through a former 800-ton 60-metre (200 ft) sand dredger.
The former living quarters of the vessel are exposed to the elements and the tide washes through the hull.
Unfortunately I couldn’t join Richard for dinner, as I was the ‘live-in part’ of my installation.
For the ‘Slice of History,’ exhibition, I was also inspired by the Titanosaur dinosaur in the American Natural History Museum in NY.
And by Cornelia Parker’s Turner-prize winning shed Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991.
(I would like to add that my intention is to display the boat slices in tact!)
The 60 slices will be hung in order from bow to stern.
*Blog title is a twist on the 80’s hit ‘‘Ice Ice Baby’ by Vanilla Ice. Showing my age here!
