PILOT

PILOT, a video and multi-channel sound installation (10 minutes) was made during a three month Berwick Gymnasium residency supported by English Heritage and Arts Council England at Berwick upon Tweed, UK. The work explores the phenomena of how we visualise the unseen, and possibilities for poetic language in the gendered space of industrial work. It features a group of men who work the Tweed Estuary pilot boat bringing a ship into harbour a night. The ship is a Russian tank carrier, converted to carry cargo, fertilizer and aggregate, its enormouse lights which were designed to light up the banks of the Volga River, light up the surface of the water. It appears like a large alien ship, its hull moving blindly across the shifting seabed just below, coaxed in by the crew of small Pilot boat. Light on the dark water, the heavy presence of the ship and the silouttes sea workers, the clang of metal and engines, the breaking sea, are used to create an immersive image and sound environment where the voices of the Pilot boat crew surface and fall as they search for language to visualise the shifting surface of the seabed and the invisible eddies and currents of the estuary, which they know intimately but have never seen.