Revelation: The Plymouth hulks, stuck between life and death

This paper critically reflects on the authors’ collaborative project, Revelation (2024, ongoing), a series of photographic diptychs of intentionally abandoned boats and ships in the River Plym estuary, which lies to the east of the port city of Plymouth, on the southwest coast of Britain. Centuries of silting from mining waste has produced a shallow river mouth and estuary basin, with mud of 30 metres in depth. This estuarine ships’ graveyard is a landscape of death, with vessels beached and partially interred in the mud. Along the foreshore, as the water level falls with the lunar cycle of twice-daily tides, the broken bodies of ships and boats – ‘the hulks’ – are exposed.

The photographs fix the riverscape at the tidal moments of stasis – the period of slack water at the lowest point when the hulks are brought to light, and at the height of the tide when their remains are concealed. The ships’ fractured bodies, deliberately abandoned in an expanse of mud and left to decay, are caught between a state of being and of unbeing, between presence and absence. These vessels are not ‘wrecked’, as in the dramatic painted shipwrecks featuring storms, rogue waves and impending rocks, or during sea battles. Rather, the bones of these rotting, wooden corpses are a metaphor for nation and Western colonial expansion. These ruined, decomposing hulks, discarded in the dying, post-industrial riverscape of Revelation, are emblematic of a traumatised, postcolonial Britain in decline, the loss of this country’s power and the impacts of Brexit.

Paper presented in the Problematising Absence: Beyond the Idyllic Landscapes panel, chaired by Liz Wells, in Theatro Polis, Nicosia.