MamaStrawberry
Simon Starling
Strip Canoe (African Walnut)/Work in Progress, 2007-2008. Wooden canoe, mannequins.
"In 1909, Herbert Lang and James Chapin were sent by the American Museum of Natural History on the first biological survey of the largely unexplored North Eastern Congo, gathering samples of plants and animals and taking thousands of photographs - including some of the Okapi, an almost mystical relative of the Giraffe which had been discovered only ten years earlier. This project by Simon Starling replicated a traditional North American strip canoe (built from the 1880s and originally based upon the Native American Birch Bark canoe).
In Starling's sculpture, the use of African Walnut (Lovoa klaineana) in its manufacture and its striped appearance alluded to the jungle camouflage of the Okapi; the canoe (built by Simon Hopkins in Glasgow), was a hybrid object: part African, part American, part working canoe, part refined sculptural form, part pantomime costume."
Simon Starling
Strip Canoe (African Walnut)/Work in Progress, 2007-2008. Wooden canoe, mannequins.
"In 1909, Herbert Lang and James Chapin were sent by the American Museum of Natural History on the first biological survey of the largely unexplored North Eastern Congo, gathering samples of plants and animals and taking thousands of photographs - including some of the Okapi, an almost mystical relative of the Giraffe which had been discovered only ten years earlier. This project by Simon Starling replicated a traditional North American strip canoe (built from the 1880s and originally based upon the Native American Birch Bark canoe).
In Starling's sculpture, the use of African Walnut (Lovoa klaineana) in its manufacture and its striped appearance alluded to the jungle camouflage of the Okapi; the canoe (built by Simon Hopkins in Glasgow), was a hybrid object: part African, part American, part working canoe, part refined sculptural form, part pantomime costume."