Currer Bell Sailing

Today, May 1, opens at the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich, UK) the following exhibition that contains an unexpected Brontë reference:

Simon Patterson
The Undersea World and Other Stories

Exhibition: 1 May–26 October 2008
Location: Level 3, Neptune Court, National Maritime Museum

The Undersea World and Other Stories investigates Simon Patterson’s consistent explorations of the sea, stars and time – themes central to the collections and research at the National Maritime Museum (NMM). The Museum unpacks the material cultures that result from human attempts to find their place in the world, be it mapping the skies above, the ocean depths below, or seeking relationships across time and space. Such structures form frameworks of understanding that are bounded by limits of knowledge and distributed through language.

The following piece has caught our attention:

(...)Patterson’s Untitled (Sails) (1996) seems to be primed to race across the waves right out of the gallery space. This set of three fully rigged racing sails, each with class mark letters and a number, points to three writers: ‘Raymond Chandler 1888–1959’ (whose Philip Marlowe stories set the standard for hard-boiled detective fiction), ‘Laurence Sterne 1713–68’ (the author of the nine-volume picaresque novel Tristram Shandy) and ‘Currer Bell 1816–55’ (Charlotte Bronte's pseudonym). Marooned on dry land, the three sails allude to the countless metaphors and narratives projected on to the sea in literature, and to the vocabulary of sailing.

Picture Source: Simon Patterson, 'Untitled (Sails)', 1996
Courtesy the artist and Haunch of Venison © Simon Patterson

Categories: Art-Exhibitions