News / Chesterton exhibition
AN EXHIBITION by painter and printmaker Jack Chesterman goes on show at Da Gadderie this weekend.
Shetland is one of the sources of reference for Archaeology of Journeying, which runs from Saturday 11 April until Sunday 17 May. He has visited the islands annually for the past 13 years.
Chesterman has had a longstanding painting and printmaking practice and has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, his work held in a number of private and public collections.
As part of the Hanseatic trading routes Shetland and Hamburg were commercially linked but equally importantly both have deeply rooted maritime cultures through which they have developed.
From Viking times when the islands were used as a service station on the sea roads between Norway and Iceland, to the heydays of cod and herring fishing, to today’s pelagic fishing and the oil and gas industries, Shetland’s history has been inextricably connected to boats.
It is a story well told in Shetland Museum and Archives, whose remarkable collection of historic boats has been a source of reference in Chesterman’s work.
In commercial shipping terms Hamburg features prominently on the world stage. The “metal bashing” skills once found in Northern Ireland and elsewhere in the UK are still to be found around Hamburg’s harbours.
Ocean leviathans, red leaded and as high as blocks of flats, are seen on slips of floating dry docks. They move people and goods around the globe but at rest, like Shetland boats, they “present extraordinary objects, counter-intuitive still lifes, redolent with stories”.
So it is with Wasdale, a small valley in the Lake District that contains England’s highest mountain and deepest lake. It “abounds with remarkable landscapes and the paths that cross it are there by virtue of commerce, religion, agriculture, conflict and recreation”.
All three places are, to Chesterton, “powerfully special, much loved and much visited”.
- Jack Chesterton’s ‘Archaeology of Journeying” opens at 12.30pm on Saturday.
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