Ghost  (2010 – ongoing)      [ installation at Tilbury Cruise Terminal, 2016 ]

Ghost  (2010 – ongoing)      [ installation at Tilbury Cruise Terminal, 2016 ]

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

Sculpture and five screen video installation exhibited in Tilbury Cruise Terminal, as part of Estuary 2016 , September 2016.

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Ghost is a kayak; a sculpture as vessel, coffin, bed, costume and camera rig. It is designed by Adam Chodzko to ferry people to the ‘island of the dead’, with a rower at the back, and the passenger lying down low and flat in the front, 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. A camera, mounted on Ghost‘s deck, records each unique voyage, the passengers’ point of view, from across its bows, monitoring the often awkward (shallow and, or concealed) littoral environment. The video archives, installed inside the Cruise Terminal’s original ticket office, reveal multiple journeys along four previous Ghost passages (The rivers Swale, Tamar, Tyne and Thames) joining new video footage created from the Essex Ghost voyages made with a people suffering from insomnia from the communities of Canvey Island and Leigh on Sea, Essex, to be shown alongside Ghost itself, held suspended in the Old Railway Station at Tilbury Cruise Terminal.
Ghost is a sustained process offering both its participants and audience a particular experience and awareness of liminality via suspending a series of states and elements in close relation to each other in order to observe their divisions and flux, such as sleeping and waking, living and dying, water and air, object and event, myth and reality, guide and passenger, stasis and journey.

Five videos:

Ghost Archive (VI)
Water: Vange and Holehaven Creeks, Essex
Date: August/September 2016
Passengers: from Leigh on Sea. With insomnia.
28 mins 53 secs

Ghost Archive (IV)
Water: River Thames, between Bankside and Deadman’s Hole, Tower Bridge.
Date: 30th May 2015.
Passengers: Karina Isajeva, a caterer at Hiscox and Robert Hiscox, Honorary President of Hiscox.
42 mins 30 secs

Ghost Archive (III)
Water: River Tamar, Devon/Cornwall
Date: September 2012
Passengers: Children from the Tamar’s riverside communities.
20 mins 26 secs

Ghost Archive (II)
Water: Rivers Tyne and Derwent,  Newcastle Upon Tyne
Date: September 2011
Passengers: the night cleaners from BAE Systems, Newcastle Upon Tyne
22 mins 17 secs

Ghost Archive (I)
Water: Rivers West Swale and Medway,
to Deadman’s Island, Kent
Date: June/July 2010
Passengers: from Queenborough,
Isle of Sheppey, Kent
19 mins.

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Ghost journeys and installation both commissioned by METAL
 for the Estuary Festival

Interview with Chris Sharratt, Artist Newsletter. 

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Related works:

Ghost  (2010 – ongoing)         [ installation for ‘Sculpture in the City’, 2015 ]
Ghost     (2010 – ongoing)
Ghost  (2010 – ongoing)      [ project with Groundwork, Cornwall, 2018 ]