Kendal and Windermere, U.K.
Abbot Hall and Windermere Jetty Museum
Boats in various forms have been a recurring presence in works by Copenhagen-based Simon Starling. The British artist’s 2005 Turner Prize-winning presentation Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No.2), for example, saw him construct a canoe from a shed that he came across while cycling along the banks of the Rhine. He then loaded the vessel with any remaining wood and paddled downstream to Basel, where the shed was reassembled in a riverside museum.
Shedboatshed embodies many of Starling’s themes, including material transformation, cyclical journeys, and an unpicking of capitalist production. It is one of six works documented across two vitrines in the archive section of “Boat Works” (on view through March 13, 2026), an exhibition that brings together his boat-related projects in the appropriately watery context of England’s Lake District. Spanning 1997 to the present, the main exhibition at Abbot Hall in Kendal includes sculpture, film, photography, drawings, and a scale model of Houseboat for Ho (2023), a beautifully crafted, ark-like construction permanently situated in a low-lying village in Denmark. Built by Danish thatchers and Bolivian reed boat builders, it embodies a merging of traditional skills to form a bond between two very different cultures, united in their vulnerability to rising water levels.
Such nuanced associations are frequent in Starling’s work, bringing layers of connection that in turn generate a sense of quiet urgency as narratives are revealed. Blue Boat Black (1997) features the charred remains of a wooden rowing boat laid out on a large table, accompanied by wall text and items involved in the creation of the work. Starling was based in Glasgow at the time it was made and traveled to Marseilles for a residency where he used wood from a salvaged National Museum of Scotland display case to construct the boat. He then went fishing and cooked his catch (including, we’re told by the wall text, un pageot, trois poisons de roche, une brème de mer) over charcoal made from the boat.
Boat burning of another kind features in Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006), made on the west coast of Scotland at Loch Long, known historically for its links to steam ships and currently home to the U.K.’s nuclear submarine fleet. In a series of 38 medium-format slides, we see a steam engine-powered wooden boat captained by Starling, which eventually sinks as bits of it are cut for fuel. The unfolding scene is reminiscent of early silent movie slapstick—amusing, absurd, and as with much of the artist’s work, informed by multiple histories and the specificity of its context.
In the film Project for Rift Valley Crossing (2015–17), Starling appears on the politically contested Dead Sea, in a canoe made from magnesium extracted from that body of water. The footage is mostly shot from above by drone, creating a dreamlike sense of liminality as well as a feeling of surveillance. Disappointingly, the boat itself is not displayed here, although the huge, room-filling Island for Weeds (Prototype) (2003) is. Originally shown as part of Scotland’s presentation for the 2003 Venice Biennale, it features a system of yellow and blue pipes on its underside designed to hold compressed air and water. The “island” itself is planted with rhododendrons, a shrub introduced to Scotland as an ornamental plant and now considered an invasive species. Conceived as a public artwork for a loch in what at the time was a newly created Scottish national park, it was ultimately deemed to be unsuitable and cancelled—the work was funded in part by a body that was also paying landowners to destroy rhododendron plants.
At the exhibition’s other venue, the Windermere Jetty Museum, there’s a second unrealized Starling project, although in this instance it’s something for the future rather than from the past. The Po River (From the Cottian Alps to the Adriatic) / An Ongoing Boat Work (2025) is a large inkjet print of plans for an amphibious bicycle with catamaran-style floats that converts to a trailer on dry land. Once completed by the museum’s master boat builders, Starling plans to use it to travel along the route of Italy’s longest river. Another engaging and transformational journey awaits.
