The Gosport ferry takes five minutes and shuttles back and forth across the Solent all day long. I was very pleased by its existence because Maps was advising me to somehow walk on water to get from Portsmouth Harbour to Gosport Museum and Art Gallery.
As we rode the high seas, I took in the views: the historic sight of HMS Victory once commanded by Admiral Lord Nelson, the grim sight of an aircraft carrier (either HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, but who really cares?); plus assorted boats of all descriptions, pleasure craft and working vessels, and a thicket of masts. It was the masts I was looking out for.
Tom Dale is a left field sculptor who modifies found objects in order to derive poetry, comedy and at times like this tragedy from their unexpected appearance in a gallery. His latest finds are 13 unwanted yacht masts, which he has partially melted from the base up so that each of them looks as if submerging into a molten metal sea. Shafts are weathered. Rigging hangs slack. Aluminium swells in puddles on the parquet gallery floor. It has a texture like oil on water.
But the masts are only more or less upright. Together they appear to lean about like crooked teeth or an array of tombstones in a horror film. Once seaworthy, then scrapped, now repurposed as an exhibition of contemporary art, these masts have caught the prevailing winds of a town where the shops are closed and boarded. Even in bright sunlight, the high street, which runs directly from the ferry dock to the gallery, is bewildering.
Perhaps it is as a result of the decline of Britain as a seafaring nation. Perhaps it owes its poverty to the long years now that Britain has somehow survived without a naval battle. Or perhaps it’s an unfortunate, sadly unforeseen side effect of the UK’s post-2008 austerity politics. One expects it’s all of the above.
But rather than neglect or redundancy, what this exhibition suggests is a roaring furnace. The dangerous, hostile environment in which this work came into being was an inferno rather than a balance sheet. Capitalism, as far as I can see, has more in common with a binfire these days, than it might have ever had with reasoned economics.
Margaret Thatcher loved Gosport. She would pop down for the annual commemoration of her war in the Falklands, a fact learned from the rich display of local history in the museum here. It’s a history the artist flags up directly even as he dissolves its outward form. In a lowering tide all boats sink. And what to do? Despite the reference to mechanisation in the show’s title ,there is no longer even enough light industry to keep this town buoyant.
I would however recommend a visit, with an option for the total package: the ferry trip; the peace in the museum cafe; the spectacle of the art. To see these yacht parts becalmed and brought into a former school hall is to walk into a three dimensional evocation of the soul of this town. And you’ll get to appreciate keeping your feet dry, at the same time, even as you immerse yourself.
Machine Borders can be seen at Gosport Museum & Art Gallery until 3 May 2025.