Every Woman: A 239ft Long Ship Painted by Artist Ciara Phillips
The World War One centenary commemorations saw Artist Ciara Phillips massive paintings on a 72m (239ft) long ship. A Dazzle Ship in Edinburgh’s docks and a new film exploring the influence of revolutionary James Connolly are to be part of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival.
The Turner Prize-nominated artist Ciara Phillips painted a massive design, called Every Woman, to the vessel MV Fingal in Leith docks as part of this year’s festival (EAF), in a work which celebrates the role of women during the First World War.
Dazzle was a technique invented by the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson during the war.
Ships were covered in abstract designs and disorientating shapes to prevent the enemy from determining their range, speed and direction of travel.
There were once 2000 Dazzle Ships.
On Saturday, the ship will set sail to the Firth of Forth, where it will be docked near South Queensferry to take part in the Battle of Jutland commemorations.
On its return to Leith docks, it will be berthed facing a different direction so that public can see the other side of the boat.
Entitled Every Woman, the new work takes Phillips’ medium of screen-printing to a “new scale as she covers the entire surface of the ship with a bold gestural design” the festival said.
Phillips has drawn on untold histories of women in the First World War, inspired by the team of women who worked under Wilkinson to develop the dazzle designs.
Women also worked as telegraphists and signallers and Phillips’ design includes a message in Morse code embedded within the design reading ‘Every Woman a Signal Tower’.
The title of the full EAF 2016 Commissions Programme this year is More Lasting than Bronze.
The boat was painted by hand with six inch rollers and a team of seven painters, including Ms Phillips, who stood on a pontoon beside the boat to paint the design.
Elsewhere in the EAF, the artist Roderick Buchanan is to create a filmed portrait of the Irish historian Owen Dudley Edwards, exploring his lifelong interest in the work and ideas of James Connolly, the Irish republican born in Edinburgh and executed in Dublin a hundred years ago, for his role in the Easter Rising.
Source: Herald Scotland
