Caption: Pim van Nunen, A boat for Ray, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and day01. Gallery, Sydney.

The late Ray Gascoigne loved the shape of ships. Taught the craft of building a vessel within a vessel within a vessel by a fellow sailor while at sea in 1949, aged 21, Gascoigne, who worked as a shipwright on Cockatoo Island, as well as a fisher, ferry master, and merchant sailor,
built “a couple of hundred” of these tiny objects, using tools he made himself or had previously used on the job. Ultimately presenting a distillation of time, held in the palm of the hand.

Pim van Nunen has also traversed the globe, has also built sculptures in bottles. Drawn to the practice, he connected with Gascoigne, whose daughter eventually bequeathed the tools of her father’s trade to van Nunen. But what to do with these bespoke objects, made by and for the same hands? In honour of Ray, van Nunen has inverted these tools and their history, incorporating them along with other objet trouvé into minimalist sculptures of vessel forms. A horizontal slash of wood, heavy with patina, anchors a small selection of other objects. Spindly brushes that once probed carefully into a bottle now rise as elegant masts. Rusty tweezers stand to attention between sections of chipped paint. The worn handles of screwdrivers emerge as pudgy chimneys. A subtle diagonal suggests a stern.

Opening Event: Friday 14 July, 5 – 7pm.

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