Souls on board, (2017) by Susan Milne

Souls on Board (2017) Susan Milne

This artwork is spotlighted in a dark space (black painted walls and ceiling) at the front of the Manly Art Gallery and Museum, as part of the North Head Project, 8 December 2017 – 18 February 2018. 

The curator is Katherine Roberts.

I was drawn first to the darkened room, and the glow of light on - what appeared at first glance to be - drapes of many muslin strips. Subtle crosses could be seen on some of the strips. The whole installation was hung from the ceiling.

First there is the pointed oval piece of Perspex (3.5m x approx. .7m) reminiscent of the shape of a ship. This is hanging on a flat plane horizontally, and is etched (?) with gently wiggly lines/shapes. It is hanging above my head, and so looking up at it, with the light coming from above gives me the feeling of looking up at the surface of the water from underneath. It is like a watery ships deck. Strips of Perspex rod and suspended from the ‘deck’, and then narrow strips of muslin/gauze are hung from these strips. These strips are packed quite densely together to give the impression of a ‘solid’ space – the hold of a ship. I have a vivid picture of the souls packed into the holds of ships in the late 18^th Century, and through the 19^th Century as ships full of convicts and/or free settlers/immigrants plied the oceans towards Port Jackson from Britain.

The arrangement of muslin strips (themselves reminiscent of cloth bandages) to from the underwater outline and shape of the hull of a ship is brilliant. It is a rudimentary outline however. To be true to the bulk of the hull, there could have been more shaping of the lower line – from side to side and from front to back. I wonder whether it was deliberate to NOT follow that line exactly.

The attachment of ‘self-fabric’ crosses to the muslin strips was minimal and very subtle – perhaps ‘vleisofix’ was used. There was no visible stitching in the attachment.

There was also no finishing of edges of the strips. In most cases the edges were raw scissor cuts, indicating to me that they have been cut from a larger piece of meterage fabric, rather than the use of actual bandages. Sometimes the selvedge edge is used. I am not sure that I like this detail. It’s a bit like the artist was not sensitive to the differences of selvedge vs non-selvedge. I would have preferred to have seen those selvedges cut off, to make the edges treatment consistent throughout the whole piece.

The whole room was enveloped in a soundscape of water lapping against the hull of a ship. The sounds are gentle, reminiscent of a ship at rest, anchored in a protected cove. The use of a soundscape reminded me of the soundscape used in the performance of the play ‘Fallen’ at the Seymour Centre, that I saw early in 2017. In that case the sounds were primarily of the creaking of the boards of the hull of the ship when it was under sail. Those sounds were active, intense and confronting. These sounds are light and gentle, the sounds of the souls floating off.

I went outside to read the artist’s statement, which I have reproduced here. It has the same beauty as the artwork. Towards the end ‘an unrecorded death nowhere’ is particularly evocative.

Souls on board suspends 572 souls representing the recorded deaths at the Quarantine Station, Manly.

As part of the disembarkation method for a yellow flagged ship moored in the waters off the station, the travellers were protected and isolated, incubated and infected, sealed and preserved. Each soul was in limbo, in a hospital where fumigation, steam and lime were the salving agents.

Dressing these souls in gauze, the artwork unrolls memories, swathing the skin shifting in the air. They are identical in suffering and yet each contains unique stories unwrapped in varying life lines.

Gauze, a breezy gleam, is laden with the sterilisation process, with a translucent porosity and as an embalming unguent. Its drape outlines the body and marks the outbreak of pestilence on the skin.

The vessel is the fragile drift across oceans, enfolding a new community and providing the means of a new beginning and the seeds of its contamination.

This artwork responds to the ardour of the journey with an enforced segregation once arrived and for many, an unrecorded death nowhere. Their body-vessels were piled, studied and lime washed.

Many of the souls on board were never noted because they had never arrived.

Susan Milne.