The Apparition is part of an ongoing series by Melody Woodnutt called ‘The Ship’ which contemplates objects as they persist over time, autoethnography, and the tropical gothic hauntings of North Queensland. In this iteration, a 15m, hand-felted, wool and silk death shroud rests with a fragment of a wooden boat ruin; it sits within an otherworldly soundscape for the exhibition.

The artwork is Woodnutt’s Sisyphean attempt to continue building her grandfather Frank’s unfinished boat frame which he was making out of love for his wife. Upon Frank’s death, the massive boat frame stood as a 17m long, 9m wide wooden skeleton – unfinished for 40 years. This conspicuously absent boat has no hull, engine, or captain, and is instead conjured as a curious intermedial and transhistorical world. The Apparition thus becomes the boat’s spectral fiction through sculpture, sound and 16mm film imagery. It speculates on the strange, unknowable realm that the boat’s ruin may inhabit and the thin, gothic, death shroud creates a veil between that world and this one.

The diverse societal meanings associated with ships or boats locally, nationally, and internationally poses a question of context and subjectivity. The original boat frame was a local, dormant, familial boat, crafted from love in its intention. In its unfinished and reimagined state, it offers a chance to reconsider a material object’s open-endedness and, in parallel, the intergenerational potential of the future.

Gothicism has a tradition of creating landscape as character. In The Apparition, we encounter a death shroud that conjures itself into a vision of a boat’s bow while afloat in a watery soundscape composed of Woodnutt’s audio field recordings from North Queensland. Through a tropical gothic mode, it acknowledges the darker undercurrents of colonialism’s ‘tropical paradise’: its racial oppressions, misogyny, and patriarchal affect. It is Woodnutt’s attempt at radical optimism to propose that objects of persistence (material, societal, political) may undergo change through the constructive force of transfiguration and time. Utilising cues from The Ship of Theseus, the artwork proposes that such a transfiguration is in motion.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a creative writing piece by Dr. Daniel John Pilkington, who recently completed a PhD. thesis, ‘Magic and the Occult in Contemporary Poetry’ at the University of Melbourne.

Opening Performance details: Untitled (Opening Act)
Duration 23 mins

A short performative evocation to illuminate the exhibited death shroud. The shroud is intended to be an apparition emergent from a long buried boat ruin. The sound, lighting and 16mm film work together to expand this apparition and create a portal into a speculative other world — one which is conjured for an unfinished boat ruin that never saw the sea.

In its heart, the artwork acts to offer a radical optimism that objects of persistence (material, societal, political) can undergo change through the constructive efforts of transfiguration.

This transfiguration allows a familial boat ruin to reach a poetic, new material form after the original boatbuilder’s death.

Performance Credits: Concept and Sound: Melody Woodnutt | Lighting Design: Lara Gabor | Violin: Adam Cadell | Percussion: Melody Woodnutt and Zela Papageorgiou | Additional Music track “Faster Than Cold” by Lawrence English and Philip Samartzis. Original Boat fragment by Frank Woodnutt.