Since 2019 we have been researching and developing new work for Hull: Yorkshire’s Maritime City Project – a £27m funded project which seeks to reconnect Hull to its prevalent maritime history.
Working as part of the wider team with lead consultants Purcell Architects, Southern Green Landscape Architects, exhibition designers Haley Sharpe Design and art consultant Hazel Colquhoun, we have been tasked to create new work that gives a voice to the city’s maritime past, present and future.
Part of our process has been to work with surveyors to undertake high-resolution scans of some of the artefacts held at the Hull Maritime Museum before they went into long-term storage. The data from these scans will be used to create two new bodies of work. The first is a digital film to be shown when the refurbished museum reopens, while the second is a series of stone waymarkers to connect the routes leading from the museum, through Queens Gardens and on to the North End Ship Yard and the Spurn Lightship.
The Hull Maritime Museum collections and historic ships are currently all in storage or undergoing extensive conservation, out of sight for a number of years before being re-presented as part of the Hull Maritime project. But for a few nights in March, as part of The Awakening festival, these artefacts, ships and curiosities from the collections came to life in various guises across the city centre.
The work we presented included the return of the Ship of the Gods adapted to be shown in the Museum Gardens, and Trove – a series of projection installations created from 3D scans of items from Hull Maritime Museum’s collections. These could be discovered at various sites along Whitefriargate.
Trove – one of the projected animations sited along Whitefriargate
Maritime riddles, created by writer, artist and author, Joanna Walsh, appeared along the pavements of Whitefriargate thanks to the magic of the light writing machine “Nyx” by Gijs Van Bon. Each riddle was inspired by the elements of Trove and slowly revealed itself to watching audiences in words made of light.
Maritime Riddles by Joanna Walsh made visible by “Nyx” – the light writing machine by Gijs Van Bon.
The film here below (best viewed at full screen) is a montage of these ten animations which includes the sextant from the whaling boat the ‘Truelove’, a ship’s bell, a whale’s eardrum cradled within a C19th desktop globe and a butcher’s block fashioned from a whale vertebra.
