Ghost (2010 – ongoing)   [ project with The Super Slow Way, East Lancashire, 2024 ]

Ghost (2010 – ongoing)   [ project with The Super Slow Way, East Lancashire, 2024 ]

Alaskan yellow cedar, western red cedar, Fijian mahogany, oak, ash, olive, walnut, and mixed media.
23” h x 31” w x 22’ l

[sculpture, performance, sustained process with a community, and a video series]

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Ghost Archive XIII: ‘Ghost heading East from Clayton-Le-Moors, Lancashire‘  (2024)   [HD, low resolution version on Vimeo, from 4K original]

Ghost Archive XIV: ‘Ghost heading West from Clayton-Le-Moors, Lancashire‘ (2024)    [HD, low resolution version, from 4K original]

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Ghost is a kayak; a sculpture, created by Chodzko, as a vessel, coffin, cradle, bed, costume and camera rig. Designed to give its passengers “the experience of becoming a spirit, gliding weightlessly through a landscape,” it ferries people to the ‘island of the dead.’ It is paddled by Chodzko from the stern, with a passenger lying down low and flat within a cockpit towards the bows, like a body in a coffin with their head slightly raised, travelling along the interface between water and sky.  This dome in the deck of the kayak separates them physically and visually from the paddler at the back.  The paddler and passenger experience the journey in silence, in order to allow space for perception, meditation and, ultimately, to imagine the movement of a spirit through a landscape. A camera, mounted on Ghost‘s deck, records the smooth flow of each unique voyage, the passengers’ point of view, then structured through editing as a memory or dream, monitoring the often awkward (shallow, partially concealed) littoral environment.
Ghost is a sustained methodological process with the journey to the ‘island of the dead’ acting as a frame for the passenger’s experience of their voyage and the potential for transformation within this encounter. It could be the perception of external evidence of entropy, stagnation, pollution, climate change or historical change. Equally, it could be focussed on internal experiences of liminality through Ghost (as object and process) suspending a series of states and elements in close relation to each other. The design and use of Ghost allows an awareness of the movement between these states (such as between sleeping and waking, living and dying, water and air, object and event, myth and reality, the trust between guide and passenger, activity and passivity, stasis and journey and the notion of place) and the perception of our selves, in the present, somewhere within these flows.  Through ritualising the Ghost journey, from the interactions based on the role of the gift (the offer of a physical sensory experience produced by physical labour, in exchange for both participation and passivity from the passenger) as well as all the various encounters between artist and viewer that the project unfolds, the Ghost process tries to examine the different fluid networks of consciousness between maker, guide, subject, object, viewer and receiver.

During exhibitions Ghost appears and disappears from the exhibition space in order to be used on water.  It then returns to its suspended state in the gallery space, now with the addition of mud, small scratches and the traces from water droplets on its hull. The marks it accumulates from this usage act as a further record of its activity, a form of ‘drawing’ onto the body of the vessel.

Ghost’s passengers come from very particular communities. They have been people ‘passing by’, a group of night cleaners from a factory, members of a book club, a youth club, a group of people suffering from insomnia, a singer singing, a community gathered  through door to door flyering, etc.  Sometimes the passengers have never travelled on water before their journey in Ghost.

Adam, discussing his role as ‘ferryman’ has said: “I paddle and that helps create your vision. Together, for a while, we share something special, a relationship of what we have both seen and felt.  But we also know that that experience is completely different, for guide and passenger.”

First exhibited in the Whitstable Biennale in 2010, Ghost has since taken hundreds of passengers along hundreds of miles, travelling along the Rivers Medway (Kent), Tamar (Devon/Cornwall), Tyne (Newcastle) and Thames (London), through the Olympic Park (London), creeks through Essex, the Rivers Helford, Fowey, and Gillan etc (Cornwall).

For this East Lancashire iteration of Ghost The Super Slow Way commissioned Chodzko to work with the Clayton-Le-Moors’ community along a stretch of the Leeds Liverpool Canal. As well as its passenger Ghost also carries a symbolic cargo of weaving shuttles, through an area rich in the historical remains of the region’s vast textile industry.
The shape of the wooden weaving shuttle and Ghost echo each other.  The shuttle weaves a line of thread, creating cloth, on its journey back and forth through a loom.  Ghost’s passage along the canal steadily builds up its digital trace as video, whilst the back and forth rocking motion of paddle through water also seems to mirror the shuttle’s movements within a loom.
Chodzko’s recent work, jengkuan (2023) is titled with the word for a weaving shuttle (Jengkuan means scope (Javanese) or reach (Malay). The jengkuan is the spool holding the weft thread) and connects that interaction between body, spool and pattern with the act of dreaming.  Travel in Ghost induces a hypnogogic state between wake, sleep and dream in many of its passengers.  Just as Chodzko steers Ghost towards a point (indicated by the tip of its bows) within a continually changing field of vision – to explore it together with the passenger/audience – in The Dreamshare Seer  (2023 – ) the tool is constantly reshaped to more closely embody the imagery from a participant’s dream.  With both projects running in tandem Ghost reveals an emphasis on a direct one-to-one physical interaction with individual members of a community, whereas The Dreamshare Seer operates through a much more remote form of intimacy with each participant.  The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads (2024) also functions through a continuous process of overtly, reflexively, guiding the participant’s attention towards things that are just about present within their vision, and things that could be visible, if reality had gone off in another direction.

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Related works:
Ghost     (2010 – ongoing)
Ghost  (2010 – ongoing)         [ installation for ‘Sculpture in the City’, 2015 ]
Ghost  (2010 – ongoing)      [ installation at Tilbury Cruise Terminal, 2016 ]
Ghost  (2010 – ongoing)      [ project with Groundwork, Cornwall, 2018 ]

Previous Ghost journey videos:
Ghost Archive (I)
Ghost Archive (IV) 
Ghost Archive (VI)
Ghost Archive (VII)
Ghost Archive (IX)

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Additional photography by Jack Bolton.