MUDSKIPPER

Ways To Make A Ship Walk by James Capper

 

18th July - 4th September 2021
MUDSKIPPER took up residency at Battersea Power Station, before travelling down the River Thames to the Royal Docks.


Demonstrations Dates
Friday 23rd July - Saturday 4th September 2021

Demonstrations took place on the North East section of the riverside, by Chelsea Bridge. In between demonstrations, MUDSKIPPER was moored by the Battersea Power Station Uber Boat by Thames Clippers pier for viewing.

Further demonstrations took place on the foreshore by Royal Victoria Gardens near Woolwich Pier. In between demonstrations MUDSKIPPER was moored in Royal Victoria Dock.

Co-Commissioned by
Battersea Power Station, Nine Elms on the South Bank and the Royal Docks Team

Supported by
Arts Council England, Rothschild Foundation, Hannah Barry Gallery, Albion Barn and Perkins Engines with additional support from the Science Museum Group and RoDMA (Royal Docks Management Authority)

Produced by
Illuminate Productions

 
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“Mudskipper has challenged everything in my sculptural language, it has pushed the envelope in the binding agent to my practice –the speculative engineering philosophy I use to execute my ideas. In reality it is here now and exists after two years of building and sixteen months of a pandemic, the great unknowns of its abilities are about to be investigated and discovered.”
— James Capper
 

MUDSKIPPER is a fully-mobile sculpture able to move across water and land through the use of two hydraulic step-type propulsion legs with component TREADPAD feet.

British artist James Capper will unveil his ambitious new work MUDSKIPPER, a large-scale mobile sculpture on Sunday 18 July 2021 at Battersea Power Station.

Co-commissioned by Battersea Power Station, Nine Elms on the Southbank and Royal Docks, the sculpture is a new work of art for the river with a series of live demonstrations taking place throughout the summer in Battersea and at the Royal Docks.

A former 1980s commercial Thames workboat, MUDSKIPPER, has been transformed by James Capper into a fully mobile sculpture (9.2 metres in length and 14.5 tons in weight), which has the ability to navigate across bodies of water and land the foreshore using a set of hydraulic jacks, offering passers-by the chance to see an experimental sculpture that crosses art, sciences and the speculative engineering divide.

Inspired by the evolution of the vertebrates, and echoing the brave leaps made by those into a new and unknown world, MUDSKIPPER challenges and invigorates the definitions of engineering and art and the interconnections between the two.

MUDSKIPPER’s ability to change its environment, combined with its engineered hydraulic jacks for land-based locomotion, gives the sculpture a brave and exigent new character on the water. In line with Capper’s practice, the amphibious sculpture explores the dynamic relationship between biological ingenuity, biomechanics, and the human. MUDSKIPPER also points to a greater journey or mission, recalling the eccentric personas of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo or Wes Anderson’s Steve Zissou, and confronting the precarity of human existence and our contemporary technological desires.

James has been planning The Walking Ship in numerous drawings since 2010. Most recently works added to this extensive project were the series of drawings Ten Ways to Make a Ship Walk published in 2016. The original idea was formed out of the surreal notion of the action of a ship or boat climbing out of the water very slowly, in a similar way to a crocodile sliding down a muddy African riverbank in the Sir David Attenborough film, Planet Earth. Its shape-shifting form of displacement and physicality, in combination with a slightly awkward method of locomotion gives the sculpture great potential as a new character on the River Thames and beyond.

An exhibition of a selection of the drawings was on show at the Good Hotel in the Royal Victoria Dock, plus an there was an opportunity to meet the artist, to discuss the development and making of Mudskipper.

 
 
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I was so delighted to hear about your upcoming project, ‘Ways to Make a Ship Walk’, by James Capper. James is a hugely innovative and exciting artist and we are very happy to endorse the project.
— Kirsten Dunne, Senior Strategy Officer, Culture and the Creative Industries, Mayor of London
 

GALLERY


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James Capper

James Capper is a British artist and draughtsman whose work adopts the techniques, materials and complex problem-solving processes of innovation and engineering to develop the possibilities of sculpture. His sculptural language evolves along different modular chains termed ‘Divisions’. Each work can be understood as a prototype and therefore each sculpture produces questions that the next work attempts to answer, so that over time each Division produces its own clear iconography and application in action. The Walking Ship is part of the Offshore Division.

Capper studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London.

Solo shows include: RIPPER TEETH IN ACTION at Modern Art Oxford (2011), DIVISIONS at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2013), SIX STEP at Rio dell’Orso with ALMA ZEVI for the Venice Biennale (2015), PROTOTYPES at CGP London (2016), SCULPTURE & HYDRAULICS at The Edge Institute of Contemporary. Interdisciplinary Arts, University of Bath (2017) and JAMES CAPPER at Bathurst Art Gallery, New South Wales, Australia (2017).

He was the youngest ever artist to be awarded the prestigious Jack Goldhill Prize for Sculpture from the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Sculpture projects in 2018 include: AEROCAB with 3-D Foundation in Verbier, Switzerland and Blue Frame with Forth Arts in Sydney, Australia.

www.jamescappersculpture.com

  


To register interest in Mudskipper, please email mudskipper@london.gov.uk