Field Trip 2: Boat Party
Lucy Gunning and Tacita Dean are venturing back to Falmouth, where they were both art students some 25 years ago (Lucy Gunning 1984-85, Tacita Dean 1987-88). As Tacita Dean has noted, ‘in those days, the art school had only a Fine Art and a Foundation course, which made for a very particular and intimate working environment, where isolation and geography played a key role in encouraging self-sufficiency and, to some extent, self-knowledge. Every student spent their time dealing in some way with the landscape, the proximity to the sea and to Cornwall itself: where, and what, Falmouth was had an inevitable impact.’
To return is never simple, and in 25 years a lot will have changed, but Lucy and Tacita have decided to map a biographical route around the coastal outline of Falmouth. They will initially divide their ‘boat party’ into two groups, one to travel by sea and the other by land, across Falmouth Bay, while establishing a line of communication between them. Then both parties will re-unite and take the traditional route of the party boat down the Carrick Roads for lunch.