Inside Mick's Hut - A Tangle of Nets
Audio description
Medium
Pen and watercolour on paper
Date:
2010
Dimensions
H 29cm x W 36cm
Project/Commissioned by:
Creative Landscapes, English Heritage/Accentuate Residency, Hastings.
Exhibited
Coastal Currents House of Hastings
Dada South/Accentuate Upstream Showcase Brighton Festival.
Sale status
Available
Links to other web pages
www.sallybooth.co.uk/CreativeLandscapes/index.html
Contact link for sale and commission
www.sallybooth.co.uk/contact.html
Full description
This drawing and watercolour is almost square in format, slightly shorter in height than in width.
On Sally's residency in Hastings, she needed to find a base on the Stade from which to work and store her paints.
Local fisherman, Mick Barrow, offered her the use of his net shop on Rock -a- Nore road and this became an invaluable source of shelter and the perfect place from which to observe and absorb the daily life of the Stade. The hut was three stories high but only 8ft x 8ft wide and chock-a-block with fishing tackle, but there was a doorstep to sit on and many of Sally's views of the Stade were made from this vantage point.
This particular painting concentrates on what can be seen inside the hut. Sally was sat scrunched up in the doorway with the net shop door open. A small section of the door frame and part of the open door, parallel to it, form strong vertical lines, which run from top to bottom of the picture only a couple of centimetres from the far left of the painting . The door frame cuts through the composition and divides the inside of the hut, filling most of the area to the right, from the outside, the strip to the left. To the left of the door is a vertical sliver of white sky with a very faint pale grey wash of a dull day. At the very bottom of the picture on the left is a tiny black/grey netshop cropped at the bottom. Its pointed pitched roof has black thin lines of horizontal cladding and the top of a long thin door is sparely indicated by a few thin vertical lines in black. The eye is drawn from the sloping roof of this hut back to the doorframe of Mick's hut, on which is hanging from a U clip a large, almost heart shaped chunky metal padlock. Its oversize rounded form and large keyhole is rather homely looking and low tech, and is in keeping with the building.
The rest of the picture on the right hand side of the door shows what is going on inside the hut. The focal point of the picture is the very centre, where can be seen a huge bundle of tangled nets. It is hanging under the first level ceiling of the hut and seems almost wedged in like a huge ball of nylon wool or a giant wasp's nest under the eaves. It takes up most of the picture and looks alive and writhing like a swarm and seems to be moving up and out towards the right as if trying to escape the claustrophobia of its confinement. The lines and strands of netting are picked out in red and green coloured felt tip pen on top of the black pen drawing. The twine and netting is drawn in squiggly lines with much of the centre being left white. The ball seems a matted, impossible tangle, and entrails of red and green twine are dangling outside the larger knot. To an untrained eye, it is hard to imagine how it could ever be unravelled, but there is probably a method to it.
Tucked under the netting is an odd lozenge type shape, unidentifiable , and with pairs of curving diagonal lines leading up and out of the picture on the right. This is part of an upturned canoe, also being looked after for somebody in Mick's hut. The rest of the hut is dark and in shadow with just a hint of the planking of the brown wooden ceiling visible at the top of the picture.
