Welded steel, 9.5 x 21 x 5, 2019.
A ship is a vessel, and so is a pot, and the history of china is the history of one carried in the other. Chinese porcelain crossed the oceans in the holds of ships, packed low as ballast beneath the tea, and reached Europe months after it left. The sculpture takes the arrangement literally. A long hull-like bar rides above a stack of hollow sections stowed low, a dish sits at one end, and a twisted sheet at the other reads as a sail or a wave. Its blue and white surface dresses the ship in the colour of its cargo, so that hull and freight are the same china.
“Slow boat to China” runs the voyage the other way and turns it into a joke about delay. The work is slow in both senses: heavy and low in the water, and held at rest by the threaded studs that space its decks apart, so that it has the weight of a voyage without the movement.
