Why a boat?
A boat stands for refuge, adventure and ambition. From a deck, out of sight of land, W. H. Auden wrote in The Sea and the Mirror: ‘All we are not stares back at what we are’.
For author Adam Nicolson, writing in the catalogue to James Dodds’s 2007 exhibition, a boat is ‘the great symbol of transcendence, of our innate capacity to move beyond the brutish realities into something better and finer, but only—and this is the paradox—by attending as closely as we know how to the nature of those realities themselves’.
He adds: ‘A boat in the hands of James Dodds is both canny and uncanny, real and unreal, here and afloat in some other ethereal space of which we will never be quite sure.’