Navigating from one waypoint to the next.
spiral stairs erected
Motueka back to 171 Breaker Bay Road.
How might one move from point to point on a Cartesian plane? Can a syntax of movement between moments be a system of navigation? Coordinates are recorded, these points are the moments brought forward, but do they allow anything other than positioning to be determined?
Found and to be reconsidered, and although permission has been granted, is this reconsideration a sort of appropriation? Can it be appropriation when proclaimed potential is considered at inception, does appropriation of an objects trajectory exist instead as a prompt or instruction? Is sailing simply an appropriation of the winds force, aiding in propulsion through space and time?
To consider improvisational play (as in composer Anthony Braxton’s structured improvisation), assemblage of moments as montage (as in film maker Sergei Eisenstein’s montage), doing so by means as bricolour (as in anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ bricolour), using these tools and means ready at hand, enables movement through poetics present in a trajectory.
I understand that engagement with such attempts inherently embody values of te ao Māori, specifically manaakitanga (care and hospitality) and whanaungatanga (kinship and relationships). Whanaungatanga explicitly relates to the greater Pacifica concept of the Vā, describing the space between generally or specifically the relational space between persons. There is need to acknowledge the relevance of these values, and to allow them to support and inform process, actions and subsequent making. (edited: 11-06-25)
When, as in how often, can one reevaluate a past consideration? Does this reconsideration temporally relate one to a past moment? Does desire to connect and the inability to do so, due to this temporal space become described as disconnected correspondence with a past moment? Do attempts to work through connections of past moments to the present articulate the flow of Deleuzian immanence? (Deleuze, G. 2001, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (Trans. Anne Boyman) Urzone Inc, New York, pg 25.)
Where then can a construction be held? In a state of waiting, ready to come forward into a future so engagement can be attempted. What parts are used to assemble a construction, where does the assemblage end?
What is the structure of a boat trailer? During assessment of the viability of the vessels trailer, attention is brought to reliance on all parts, including support structures, within or outside of, visible or otherwise. What is it to transport a vessel that is itself a means of transport? How long will navigation from A to B take?
Tasks often fail due to one detail or other that is made evident in the moment, eg: a bent point on the mast inhibited the sprit car from running all the way up the mast. Due to not having the sufficient tool/s on hand, the water test was limited to rowing on 27-12-24.
Although this vessel has the ability to move on water, support structures are required to enable the vessel to be transported on land. Do these structures exist as part of the vessel, unable to be separated. With one support structure replaced with another, are the previous structures still present within?
The task of replacing a rusted out trailer for a ‘new’ trailer, which was found by asking around the community my parents are a part of.
What about the support structures that enabled the boat to be built in the first place? I visited Graham Hoyte on the 12th May, 2023 to discuss this ongoing project, in the end he offered the saw horses he still had from the construction of the MBP vessel in exchange for a new set. (Photo below provided by Hoyte on the day.) Although I have not found any photo evidence that these supports were used, they are a stand in for Hoyte as a support structure himself. A year later my father-in-law and I picked these up, dismantled the pair into two bundles as the new set were, and so they could be readily transported. *Look up the name of the tool — as in, considering those who labour over a vessel, construct a vessel, a barrel maybe, something to hold something else, using tools to construct another tool… objects related to an origin. As in, Albert Camus’ Le Premier Homme (The First Man) 1994. pg 124.
Entry and exit a site once defined by particular expectations of use. There is a way to bring point A forward or alternately point B forward with A residing into the background.
Within a site, efforts are made to navigate potential via use of a tool connected to that site.
Actioned by friend, Robert Van Garderen. (Documented by J.A. Kennedy)
What is it to be self supporting with use of a supporting structure?
(Photos courtesy of Hazel Davies)
Supporting vessels for an open studio made by Jack Tilson and students of Woodfired Pottery School
What are the problematics of a tiller connected to a point of departure?
The opportunity to engage in research relating to labour and potentials associated with moving the sailing vessel ‘OM’ 🕉️ (MMSI 338316308). ‘OM’ is owed to the serendipitous requirement to aid the owner and captain Ahmed F. Agrama. Agrama’s daughter, Natasha requested the desire for her farther to take crew for the 2600 NM journey via a mutual friend, Chiara Giovando, who had recently visited Aotearoa. The timing and my vicinity to Opua, allowed me to be present and on hand soon after the request was made, which Natasha described as, miraculous.
Although the act of return did not transpire as intended, and my intentions to action tasks for 24 hours after passing the 180º longitude now impossible, we returned the sailing vessel to Opua safely. At the moment of returning, both directions were definable as a ‘return.’ The warp and woof of engaging with Captain Ahmed from the 9th - 28th April 2023 produced, a collection of audio recordings, still and moving images, a log book, and a series of drawings. This material can be seen to represent this moment or exist as phenomenal evidence, itself able to be returned to.
23-4-23, the first night at sea consisted of four-hour shifts. 7:30 hrs, as daylight broke through the mist, I thought of what to prepare in the galley for our first of a few breakfasts at sea. Dreaming of grilled cheese sandwiches, we settled on lukewarm porridge with dates and oak milk. A more than welcome sight, smell and taste.
8:30 hrs, 100nm offshore, we experienced a series of alarms, resulting in a total digital navigation instrument failure. This meant the auto-helm had no data to function. With preparation for a minimum of eighteen days in front of us, we realise manual steerage would be exhausting in even moderate weather. This in mind, Captain Ahmed decides the boat has spoken, only eighteen and a half hours into our passage to Pape’ete.
Regardless of the favourable weather window ahead, our attempt to return ‘OM’ to Los Angeles, via Pape’ete and Honolulu, has failed. Now forced to return to Opua to diagnose the issue and consider an alternate plan.
While located at about 34S / 175E the boat had jibed and redirected itself 180° off our intended course. As fate may have it, heading directly back the way we had come. In response we simply adjusted the sails, that had been supported by the purposely rigged prevention lines, and settled into the site of the infamous long white cloud on the horizon.
19 hours later, back in berth F33, with a ginger beer in hand, we celebrated our gratitude for an uneventful safe return and for being 100mn, not 1000mn offshore.
What leviathan was avoided? The eddies hardly developed on our way toward the edge of the earth, we were brought back to land by means of a machine we were only part, not necessarily in complete control of. The consensus; it was fortuitous, we each needed to be somewhere else other than spending eighteen days at sea. It was the preparation of this trip that was required to see a little more clearly, the potential walked through, but not necessarily actioned. Instead of completing the passage itself, the failure allows other aspects of life to be attend to.
Designed by Paul Selway and built by Maddie Leach and Graham Hoyte, this 2006 work was commissioned and curated by Natasha Conland and Charlotte Huddleston, shown by Te Papa Tongarewa, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, November 4, 2006 until June 10, 2007.
In 2015, in an effort to refuse the sailing vessel’s ability to attain the status of cultural commodity, Leach decommissioned MBP as an art object. First the object was sailed as part of a Wellington Classic Boat Regatta, then efforts were made to sell the boat. Eventually, Leach proceeded to act in a way that ennobled reciprocity as a form of rational and decolonized exchange, gifting the vessel to the next custodian, Matt Holland. In 2019, after discussions with Leach regarding how one might dispose of an object d’art of my own, I was put in contact with Holland. On 26-11-19, after reaching an agreement I became the next / current custodian of the sailing vessel from MBP (Holland came to name the vessel, Maddie).
Maddie is a sailing vessel of open potential, which currently exists within a liminal zone, an in-between zone. In a focused sense, a machine able to questioned as both a machine with a body as well as without, which has the ability to be defined by an explicit function while simultaneously and poetically speak to the following questions — What if Tacita Dean could sail Donald Crowhurst’s Teignmouth Electron, or the sea shanties sung for Part III of Bas Jan Ader’s In Search for the Miraculous on his return to The Netherlands? What might be done if Marcel Duchamp’s original Bottle Rack (Porte-Bouteilles), 1914, was found at this moment in time? What might be drawn from entering the water of Heraclitus’ river? — How might MBP be returned from where it has been found (Motueka / the other side of the river / Cook Strait), to waters below, looking back up toward its place of origin, Te Papa Tongarewa?
Met with Maddie Leach on the 6th November 2021. Sitting at the park in Devonport and looking back towards Helen Escobedo’s public sculpture, Signals (1971), we discussed the boat, which was no longer considered an art object as it had been “…pushed out to sea.” We agreed this designation allows the potential of engagement to be considered as both ‘simply just a boat’ and simultaneously holding potential to again become an art object, if the current custodian wishes to claim use in that way.
The first use of the boat, evidenced in these images, notes the moment the boat was ‘decommissioned as an art object.
Leach went later attempted to sell the boat before making it available to the first person to pick it up. (The boat was almost destroyed in a fire prior to this occurring.)
Is the effort to engage like lifting a box up a set of stairs? A Sisyphean slapstick joke or something more?
Laurel & Hardy, The Music Box, 1932. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD8I6SG_DAU (Accessed 18-2-21)
Floating, focused on the potentials of being in a liminal zone, a space between, a tidal flat. A place that is redefined twice a day with regular changes due to the comings and goings of water. The substance that enables life itself, I’m forced to consider what it means to return.
The following actions work through this forever developing notion, where empirically engaged research allows the collection of material to be considered as a means to transpose fleeting moments into tentative contexts where I aim to hold them for as long as possible.
What does it mean to return to a found object, one that once looked out toward the offing?
