Hartlepool Coastal Plinth - Seaton Carew

The sculpture is a bronze casting of an imaginary boat.  It is a vessel for the imagination and as such no particular boat, simple in its construction moulded in clay and cast in bronze, with a long prow cast from rope, and a stern which has a cast bronze rope which over reaches the whole ship to hold a bell.  The boat sits on a cast bronze bell which echoes the top.

The idea seeks to hold the history and poetry of the place, its shipbuilding past, its ecclesiastical heritage (the bells) and the character of the people and to posit a way forward.  The creative intention was to make a boat which is static but which poetically captures a vessel poised and still in time, with only the bell ringing in the wind, a universal vessel which distils the idea of the sea, and the purposes which come from the sea.  It has a quality of melancholy, defined as sadness with humour.