Galleries > Le Canoë des Blancs
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Le Canoë des Blancs [White-man’s Canoe] 2015-16
The fabled canoe of australian lore,
a full-sized barbed-wire canoe.
size: 4m x 1.55m x .85m
materials: barbed wire, steel base.
Winner of the Noel Doepel 3D Award - 2015 Watermark
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This canoe is an interpretation of the Tasmanian indigenous canoe as documented by the French Baudin Expedition in 1802.
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Le Canoë des Blancs was built for the 2015 Watermark exhibition, the brief being 'inspired by water'. In 2016 I fully de-constructed and rebuilt the canoe to straighten and widen it, as I had built it in a hurry to enter the exhibition. I also improved the base.
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Cygnet's First Nation People, the Mellukerdee, were recorded by the French Baudin Expedition in 1802 of using canoes; “Two canoes were drawn up at the water's edge, each formed of three rolls of bark loosely held together by strips of the same material” (Brown AJ, Ill-Starred Captains, Flinders and Baudin, 2000). These French records, including sketches, of their water-craft are one of the few threads to pass through the bottleneck of recent history, and form much of the contemporary knowledge about these canoes. Cygnet too has a long European history of commercial boat building, the most notable being the Wilsons family, and continues today with a small active boat repair industry, resident Shipwrights and a harbour to many sailing boats.
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The French title acknowledges the importance of the French exploration, and the continued role French people play today in our community, largely as seasonal fruit-pickers. It also purposely has demeaning connotations and ultimately refers to the fact that only a white-man would build a 250kg canoe out of barbed wire. I am that man.
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