Melody Woodnutt

Master of Contemporary Art

The Ship references an unfinished familial project in the form of a 17-metre wooden boat frame located in North Queensland. This conspicuously absent 'boat' has no hull, sea, or captain, and is instead conjured as a curious intermedial and transhistorical world. Presented as a portal into a 'tropical gothic' realm and the boat’s contextual/colonised landmass, the artwork becomes an allegory for historical objects persisting over time and space. The myriad meanings associated with 'ships' both within and beyond the violent construction of so-called Australia represents a fractured colonial inheritance, at once personal and societal.

Utilising expanded cinema and cues from The Ship of Theseus, this work constitutes an attempt to finish building my grandfather's 39-year-old unfinished boat. The artwork thus becomes its spectral fiction.