Bannockburn

This work is part of a series titled Lost Tablets which express a tension between a universally recognisable children’s toy and the grammar of architectural symbols. The works are memorials to the stories of real and fictional ships found crew-less and adrift at sea.

The Black Pearl is named after the fictional ship in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. The work is a monument to the artifice used to depict the ship as real. In the first film a large wooden structure was assembled atop a steel barge. For the second and third movies, in the shipyards at Bayou La Batre in Alabama, a floating sailing ship was built on the hull of the cargo ship Sunset. A third ship was built specifically for the filming of the Maelstrom battle. In 2010, the Sunset, which played the Black Pearl in most of the films, was reconstructed to portray The Queen Anne's Revenge in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

The work is composed of blocks of found Lego which bear the marks left on them by their former owners. Discolouration, writing, dirt, glue, and even teeth marks are evident on the found blocks and romantically embraced in the new object.

The architecture of her sheer face is bound by the tension between the new profile of the tablet, and the varying surface qualities of the found blocks, each with the markings of its own history.

The shapes of the dynamic face are bound together by the tension between the expectation of what a Lego composition would usually prescribe, and the language of an imagined collective architectural unconscious rendering in memory of the ghost ship she mourns.

The strange resonant familiarity of the tablets are designed to oscillate between the platonic, almost primal, recognisability of Lego, and the deeply known, but less frequently described, architectural grammar of the built world.

Each of the works in the series has the same overall dimension and ships with a 25cm diameter round white powder-coated base on which they are magnetically fixed.