Interview: Woven Whaling with Caroline Hack
Historic practices of whaling are often manifested in dark silhouettes of sharp harpoons, rigid chunks of slippery soap, and roughly carved bone.
Textile artist Caroline Hack chooses instead to weave whaling histories in a softer form; delicately embroidered and sewn artworks bringing awareness of the devastation of whale hunting, whaling communities and their ways of life, and the conservation of whales all around the world.
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In Scotland’s Whale Road, the latest exhibition here at Discovery Point in Dundee, Hack’s deep interest in Britain’s whaling heritage intertwines with sensitivity and a passion for whales. Alongside an 18th century baleen corset, jute fibres and intricately carved whale bone sit a number of embroidered and stitched pieces created by Hack depicting the crash of waves on whaling vessels, the grandeur of the Royal Research Ship Discovery under sail, and a key invention in the understanding and conservation of one of the world’s most endangered species.
Ahead of an illuminating Tour & Talk event uncovering information behind the exhibition and tales from Dundee’s maritime past, Caroline Hack shares insights on the power of whales, challenging viewers to pause and question worldviews, and the joy of a Desert Island Discs episode that first aired over 50 years ago.
Your work often reflects historical whaling practices. What draws you to this subject matter, and how do you conduct your research for each piece?
“I read Moby-Dick in the summer of 2001 before I started at Art College as a mature student and that book has been a continuing influence on my work. But I realised that ‘Moby-Dick whaling’ (three years sailing around the world hunting sperm whales) wasn’t our whaling. In Britain our commercial whaling history mostly involved summer voyages to the arctic hunting right whales. I also discovered that our museums and archives held a vast resource of interesting objects and documents telling that story.
“Travel and research are an important part of my practice. I have been fortunate to visit some of the sites connected with this important industry, including Spitsbergen, Greenland, Shetland as well as Dundee, Peterhead, Hull and Whitby. If I am working on an exhibition for a particular place I will talk to the curators about their specific interests and that can influence my work, but it is the collections and stories they tell linked to place and time that fascinate me.
“After many years of researching and making work around the same subject I have a vast personal resource of photos, drawings and notes which I can make use of and select from to build a composition that tells the story I want to share.”
Can you describe your use of materials and what you hope each brings to your work?
“My choice of materials is always dictated by the subject of the piece. I studied fine art printmaking at art college but drifted into using textiles in most, but not all of my work. A handmade book will be the most effective way to share an episode from a whaler log book, an embroidered tarpaulin harpoon cover a way to commemorate an anniversary of a whaling moratorium. The small details matter to me too.
“I sew a lot of text in my work and will replicate the handwriting from an 1830 account slip, as in Victualling, or the old-fashioned serif typewriter font in the Discovery Oceanographic Expedition 1920s inspired pieces. I have a large stash of materials, threads and other bits and bobs collected over many years and often a rummage through these boxes will produce the perfect fabric for a composition.
“The upper fabric from Victualling is a woven silk remnant bought at a fabric shop on my travels years ago, and for me it’s colours and woven texture perfectly captured the industrial landscape of a jute producing industrial Victorian city.”
I realised that ‘Moby Dick whaling’
wasn’t our whaling
How do you approach narratives in your work?
“I would hope that viewers of my work already believe that industrial hunting of whales is not a good idea, so I don’t feel I have to advocate for that. What I would like people to understand is that we have a rich heritage of preindustrial whaling, so I use imagery from museum collections, maybe something on display in the room where my work is hung.
“One of the reasons I use maps a lot in my work is to help the view understand where this activity occurred; but I also like to have fun with maps. Turning the map upside down in Testing the Southern Whale Fishery makes the viewer pause and maybe think about why we are so used to seeing the map of the world that way up.
“Sometimes I don’t want to be too subtle. One piece of data that I really wanted to highlight was the percentage of juvenile blue whales being caught in the mid-1920s in the south Atlantic. This figure in red in Testing the Southern Whale Fishery indicted that the whale fishery was not sustainable as too many whales were being killed before they reached sexual maturity and that we knew this in the 1920s but couldn’t or wouldn’t stop for decades, until we nearly lost the blue whales, is terrible.”
Your work highlights both historical and contemporary threats to whale populations. How do you balance these two perspectives?
“My practice is not about activism. I predominantly make work around more historic forms of British whaling which is less controversial than current whaling issues, but in a piece like Whales Historically Regarded I highlight that we still kill significant numbers of whales today, but because of ship strikes and entanglement in the debris of fishing that we leave floating in the seas rather than intentionally hunting them.”
What emotions do you hope to evoke in viewers? Particularly in pieces such as Stoved II?
“This very striking but simple image is inspired by a 1927 whaling cigarette card that I have in my collection. I purposely edited out the sailors to produce an image more about the whale than the men. I want viewers to see the power of the whale, and how, at least in the preindustrial era the whale hunters didn’t have it all their own way. A strike from a whale tail could destroy a whale boat and drown the whalers.”
What does it mean to show your work here at Discovery Point, beside RRS Discovery?
“It is a tremendous pleasure and honour to have my work at Discovery Point right next to that iconic ship, especially the work inspired by the Discovery Oceanographic Expedition in the 1920s. I have made work about British Arctic whaling for many years and Dundee is a big part of that story. That skill and tradition of building solid wooden ships for whaling in punishing arctic waters is why the Discovery was built in Dundee.
“It is a beautiful object in its own right and in spaces like the on-deck lab you can imagine the science and research that happened on aboard. In addition to this, Scotland’s Whale Road, the exhibition that my work forms a part of, is really excellent and I would have travelled up to Dundee to see it!”
You undertook extensive research of Sir Alister Hardy and the Discovery Investigations for this exhibition. Were there any findings that surprised you?
“I knew nothing about Hardy or the Discovery Oceanographic Expedition when the curator at Discovery Point approached me with the possibility making some work around it for the upcoming centenary. The subject and subject matter soon captured my imagination. Several people recommended Hardy’s book Great Waters about his role in the voyage and I found an ex-library copy online and would recommend to book to anyone interested in the voyage, the ship or the development of early maritime science. It is very readable and he takes you by the hand into the fascinating world of marine biology along with all the trials of working in such a harsh environment on a steam auxiliary powered sailing ship.
“I’ve become totally obsessed by the Continuous Plankton Recorder that Hardy developed. I recently visited the CPR Survey laboratory in Plymouth where they still sample plankton in the same way. This gives us nearly 100 years of comparable data about plankton distribution in the oceans. An amazing resource being used in ways that Hardy could never have imagined (climate change and microplastic for example). I loved being able to make my own version, albeit in fabric, and it gave me a detailed understanding of how it worked.
“I was also surprised to find he had such a link with Hull, a place I know well because of it’s Arctic Whaling heritage. Visiting Hull University where he was one of their founding Professors in 1927, there is a building named after him and one of Hardy’s Continuous Plankton Recorder still in the Biology Department!
“I’m not sure if it’s a finding that surprised me but after a year of investigating Hardy’s work on the Discovery and beyond I found that he’d been on Desert Island Discs and hearing him talk about his life via the BBC iPlayer was delightful.”
How do collaborations or community engagement shape your projects?
“Because of the nature of my practice I’m not an artist who works with community groups or does workshops, but I do talk to curators and other people engaged with the subjects that interest me. I am part of an artist’s support programme at an art gallery local to me and have presented some of my ideas for work around the Discovery Oceanographic Expedition. It has been useful to hear their responses.
“To some extent I would classify the new work I was commissioned to make for the Scotland’s Whale Road exhibition as a collaboration of sorts, as the subject was suggested to me and I had a number of conversations about some of the topics that the exhibition would cover with people at a number of other places. The content and format of the works was very much my decision, but I was delighted by the positive responses of team at Discovery Point to the imagery I had included in the works and the part of the story I highlighted.”
How have audiences responded to the themes of whaling and environmental sustainability in your exhibitions?
“Most of my work focusses on historic whaling, but I regularly have discussions with visitors about current whaling.
“Although I am against industrial whaling, I believe it is up to indigenous populations with a cultural history of sustainable small-scale whaling for community use to make their own decisions about whaling, and I will robustly defend this stance if necessary.
“However, mostly visitors share their stories of seeing whales in the wild – something I’ve been fortunate to do on several occasions – and talk about the things that inspire my work and some of the techniques and materials I use.”
What themes are you currently exploring in your work and where do you see it going in future?
“I am working with a range of partners and organisations around the centenary of the Discovery Oceanographic Expedition often as a catalyst for them to think about doing something to celebrate the Discovery and/or Hardy. I am planning to produce work around this for the next few years.
“It’s been very rewarding to expand my area of interest to South Atlantic Whaling via the Discovery Oceanographic Expedition and its findings, and has felt like a natural extension to my practice.”
Caroline Hack’s work embodies the emotion behind Scotland’s Whale Road. While recognising the historic practice and its current forms, the exhibition allows visitors a glimpse into the devastating effects of the trade, before introducing the RRS Discovery and its role in turning the tide from hunting to conservation of one of the world’s most endangered species.
Thank you to Caroline for her continued collaboration and support, and for sharing her story with us for this blog post.
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