Page 5 - Art First: Will Maclean: Gleaned and Gathered

Ωethreetimes ofWillMaclean

On the 7th September 2014, whilst this text was in prepar ation, Canadian
marine archaeologists made the signifi cant discovery from the 1840s of one

of Sir John Franklin’s lost boats, either the HMS Erebusor HMS Terror, lying
just eleven metres below the water in the Victoria Strait in the Arctic terri -
tory of Nunavut. ²e sonar image of the ghostly wooden hull on the seabed,
sent around the world by the Canadian media, looked uncannily like a relief

sculp ture by Will Maclean, redolent as it was with narra tives of seafar ing,
naviga tion, history, tragedy and archaeology. ²inking about it further,
I believe the Franklin discovery encap sulates something even more funda -
mental in the art of Will Maclean that I wish to explore in this essay accom -

pa nying his remark able new exhibition, Gleaned and Gathered. It is the sense
that Maclean’s art, like the wreck now discovered, reveals three very partic -
ular kinds of time that merge together in rich and complex ways—these are
what I will call ‘historic time’, ‘craft time’ and ‘mineral time’.

²e First Time: Historic
²e loss of Franklin’s boats in 1845resulted in the painful and extended
death of 129crew members, as they scat tered over the ice sheet, and a 169

year search that is still not over. Yet another maritime tragedy is the prompt
for one of Maclean’s major pieces in this show, A Candle for Lübeck(2014).
²is tragedy was partic ularly poignant because it took place only one day