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Sailing Home

performance by Sonja van Kerkhoff 2009
From the Whanganui Art Gallery entrance to down the War Memorial Steps,
installation, Greenbench Gallery by Sonja van Kerkhoff + Sen McGlinn
Whanganui, Aotearoa | New Zealand

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff
I started placing these paperboats, boat after boat,
at the entrance of the Whanganui city art gallery
down the War Memorial steps towards the main street.

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff 

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

In this setting "Sailing Home" came across as a poetic intervention; evoking links between the art world or a world of metaphor and the day to day or social life.

This performance was also about the importance of context, relating strongly to the theme of re-positionings, a recurring theme in my work.

Nine years earlier in 2000, while artist-in-residence at the gallery, I took 19 snail-forms for a walk down these same steps. For some of the visitors, these boats served as symbols of re-location in another way. We had just been travelling by boat (waka) down the Whanganui for the past 6 days.

The boats as objects themselves are also a re-positioning in my oeuvre. They were first made for the 2002 performance, "Colonizing Oxford by boat", in which I made the boats from pages out of my children's schoolbooks and placed them along a main shopping street in Oxford (U.K.).

In the Whanganui performance they serve as vehicles for the whimiscal or poetic; I feel part of the land there. So I called this "Sailing Home" rather than "Colonizing" changing the whole experience of the performance.



Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff
Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff 
Photos: Sophie Klerk, Whanganui
+ Sonja van Kerkhoff
Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

Performance on the street by Sonja van Kerkhoff

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