Catherine Bertola ‘ghostship’ 1999

I think Bertola’s ghostship is a stunning piece of art and something very haunting which I would of loved to see. Her work appears very powerful and this is something I would like my work to project. I love that all that is left are the photographs of the event. Her work takes three forms, that of perfomance, video and photography. I love that she has bought something dead to life, and has simply enhanced the beauty of something left behind. Her work is referencing the Irish relationship with the sea – and Ireland as an island nation where the sea took many guises, the light ships were used as targets for bombers during the war and Ghost ships play a part in Irish mythology, phantom ships, seafarers’ tales, and the ‘FamineShips’ carried the Irish emigrants in their thousands to America during the potato famine in 1845. I love the history behind this work and the scale and size of the project, although this is not something that links in with my brief at the moment, I feel she influences me to not be scared to create powerful large scale pieces of work.

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