![]() Hunley was not seen again for over a century. Hunley rammed Housatonic below the water line, detonating the torpedo, tearing a hole in the Union ship’s hull and sending her to the bottom along with five of her crew. Carrying a torpedo packed with explosive black powder bolted to a 16-foot spar, H. On 17 February 1864, after months of practice runs and weather delays, the Confederate submarine, under cover of darkness, silently approached USS Housatonic, a 16-gun, 1,240-ton sloop-of-war, on blockade duty four miles off the entrance to Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. With many of the features that would become standard in later submarines, including diving planes and raised conning towers, the boat is a prime example of the American technological ingenuity that characterized the Civil War period. Each end was equipped with water ballast tanks that could be flooded by valves or pumped dry by hand pumps. It was powered by a hand crank operated by a crew of seven, with an eighth member to pilot the boat. Privately built in 1863 by Park and Lyons of Mobile, Alabama, with the financial backing of Horace Lawson Hunley, the submarine was constructed from rolled iron boiler plate with custom cast iron fittings. Although the boat and its crew were lost as a result of this endeavor, the success of their mission proved that this new style of naval warfare would be an inevitable course of future development. Hunley has the distinction of being the first submarine to sink an enemy warship in wartime. She acknowledges that in questioning this practice and creating this artwork, with cruel irony, she herself has had to destroy books.The Confederate submersible H. The artist draws our attention to the fact that for a variety of reasons, many of our cultural institutions are currently acting both clandestinely and openly to dispose of large numbers of books. The book itself is a form of collective remembering, as the many who handle and read it add to its wear and tear and like an aged body, this encourages an attitude of respect and empathy. In their materiality they tell a story that cannot be told in the same way by digital media. Other marks show the signs of use: of being held and handled, of being considered and valued. The elements of an archival system are also visible in labels and handwritten catalogue numbers. The installation explores the aesthetics and provenance of the book covers, highlighting the absorbing titles, textures, colours and fonts, that speak so resonantly of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. These books about the past have a haunting resonance given recent heightened nuclear tensions between North Korea and the USA. The most poignant, for the artist were books written by individuals about their own war experiences, and written in the hope that ‘we never forget the horrors of war’. The ‘found’ books were nearly all about War: the many wars in history and especially about the first and second world wars, the countries involved and the aftermath of war. The exhibition is about memory- the very human act of forgetting, and selective remembering and the artist draws attention to the books as being both visually and historically intriguing conduits for this. The installation is made from over 300 book covers, ‘rescued’ from the United Service Institution of WA Library (a library belonging to Officers of the Defence Forces at the Perth Barracks) that was disbanded a few years ago and was going to be sent to landfill. ![]() ![]() The submarine along with its 35 crew disappeared later that year, while on patrol near New Guinea, and after being lost for 103 years was discovered again in 2017. This large-scale 14 metre long installation is made in the shape of the AE1 – the first Australian Submarine- built in 1913. Video for Australian National Submarine Museum: ![]() This installation is now displayed at Shenton College, Shenton Park, WA Listen to an artist interview () between myself and Andre Lipscombe about this exhibition on the Art Collective Website: (opens for PIAF festival exhibition 12 Feb) WARSHIP- the Glorious Decline of the Officers’ LibraryĪn installation by Jo Darbyshire At John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, WA 21 October 2018 - 10 March 2019 Aft WARSHIP- the Glorious Decline of the Officers’ Library ![]()
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