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
This canoe is an interpretation of the Tasmanian indigenous canoe as documented by the French Baudin Expedition in 1802.
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.
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.
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.