The Haar, the Sunrise, the Birds and the Boat

She endures. Despite the Harvest Moon tides and a variety of dinghies, assorted floats - although less sand shovelling and anchor realignment - our ghost ship remains, albeit listing a little more gracefully to the left, hunkering down perhaps, for a season of winter storms and a bit of a lashing. Nothing that she hasn’t weathered before though, criss-crossing the banks and troughs of the Irish Sea and the ins and outs of the Ards peninsula. Photos of the younger Day Dawn at work can be unearthed online (above @ J McPhee, 2009) looking stoic and purposeful, with the same spirit that is keeping her, against the odds, just about afloat. Fittingly enough, I sometimes see her at daybreak, when there’s a haar rising from the lough, a darkened, slumbering shape just before the sun breaks over the skyline to the edge of the bridge.

Later, if I’m out drawing, there are mammies and wains making their way down to see their ‘pirate ship’, all heads turning to the haunted waters. Have found a good spot to draw. Neither too visible on the path nor stuck out on the glar, but in-between, tucked into the grassy edge just above an upturned box belonging to the ‘Portavogie Fishermans’ Association’ warning of ‘no unauthorised use’. Here to sketch her I am distracted by the birds. Crows, curlews and gulls, one fastidously turning over a flat stone, another making little stomping steps in the mud to flush out something tasty. I haven’t seen them onboard yet, they know she’s still alive. No fish on the decks but no hulking carcass either, the birds are ordinary yet glorious, a bit like the Day Dawn herself.

In this month of two full moons - Harvest and Hunter - the fourth planet from the sun has already made a portentous and rare, rusty-red appearance. As coincidence slides into strangeness, the Hunter’s moon is also a Blue moon which will rise on the night of All Hallow’s Eve. On the ground, the city will feel and look different this year, with less Halloween bling, visitors and costumed crowds. But above and around us the world is shifting and sorting, restless, maybe revelatory. The in-betweenness of the time that’s in it, the gloaming and the ghost ship that has come as a gift to the city, who knows whether as warning or promise. Enduring. Just about.

Day Dawn, Portavogie NI82, Lough Foyle, ink and pencil on paper @ Mhairi Sutherland October 2020

Meeting the Moon.

July 2019, the month when the Apollo 11 manned flight to the Moon took place 50 years ago, with the inevitable widespread coverage of all things lunar. In July 2017, two years ago, I was visiting the Hasselblad and the Moon permanent exhibition in the Gothenburg Museum of Art. Arriving in Sweden with only a few days to divide up between Gothenburg and travel to Linköping, I knew that there was only a short time for research in the excellent Hasselblad Foundation photographic archive and library. With a quantity of publications to work through, assisted by the deeply knowledgeable librarian Elsa Modin, having enough time to view the historic cameras was not really on my list. But by the end of day one my pile of books was shrinking nicely, and when Elsa quietly suggested to myself and Marta, another researcher, that she could show us the cameras and give a tour of the Hasselblad and the Moon exhibition in the gallery the following day, the opportunity seamlessly became part of the research priorities.

I was already feeling incredibly fortunate to be one of the small number of shortlisted artists supported by an award for my proposal to research the relationship between SAAB aerospace and aspects of Swedish militarism, as part of the Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest project. And as Victor Hasselblad had previously made a military camera for the Swedish Air Force, a predecessor for the cameras taken to the moon, the connections between aerial reconnaissance and vertical viewing practices were fully encapsulated within the historic HB cameras.

 So awe and wonder were added to fortunate, as Elsa told us the story of the moon cameras, of Irna Hasselblad’s contribution as well as Victor’s, as we looked at the back of a camera with ‘sun set + rise’ hand-written on it, together with the F-stops used, at a gold-plated camera, and at the exhibition which includes ornithology photographs but no military camera. But ambivalence too, about the cameras that created images that let us see the surface of the moon, and the vulnerability of our own planet, seen from space for the first time.

That perspective, in this month which commemorates the events of 50 years ago, has generated much rhetoric around greatness and achievement, both headlines and behind the scenes stories. Curiously, considering the cascade of tech developments either initiated or stimulated into production as a result of that space race to the moon, there has been scant critical discourse around that unique and potentially radical perspective. Apart from the hoax and conspiracy theories, there is precious little deviance from the master narrative of advancement and progress. The stratospheric surveillance and systems of verticalised warfare, including drones, all first cousins of the Apollo missions, the arguments about which has been muted amongst the clamour of celebration. When the fuss has died down, maybe time to raise those dissenting voices?

Back of one of the HB Moon cameras. (2017) Copyright the artist.

Gold-plated HB camera. (2017) Copyright the artist.