Exhibition, Lesley Logue & Sarah Taylor – The Pearce Institute, Govan, Glasgow – August 2024

The exhibition, The Court of Neptune, provides a platform for artists Logue and Taylor to explore their family histories and their links to Govan. Logue’s father worked in the ship building industry, serving his apprenticeship at Fairfield Shipyard. Taylor’s father joined the Merchant Navy travelling between the UK and Australia on the passenger liner ORSOVA. The mutual family history linked to ships, sea, travel, industry and class acts as a starting point and dialogue between the artists. 

Logue explores Glasgow’s Ship building past through the lens of her father. As a child she believed he must be a pirate as he worked on ships and had a skull and cross bone tattoo. Growing up she quickly realised that the truth was more straightforward than swashbuckling and like so many other working class men and women he worked in an industry that was demanding, dangerous and dying. 

For this exhibition Logue references just some of the many ships her father worked on, which led her to consider the global impact that the ship building industry has had on trade, economies, conflicts, politics, working class families and the environment.

Taylor had always admired her fathers ‘crossing the line’ certificate that commemorated his first voyage across the equator an ancient rite of passage in naval tradition. This apparently brutal and vulgar initiation ceremony was outside of any official regulation but was important in installing the camaraderie and values of the navy. Lessons learned here remained important to Taylor’s father’s core values of being one of the team throughout his working life. Smoking was a romanticised aspect of a sailor’s demeanour. The sophisticated adverts of players cigarettes provided seductive aspirational imagery alongside the issue of informative cigarette cards, that could be collected. Tobacco tins conveniently stored drill bits and nails in her father’s shed. In seven of the pictures in the exhibition, the tins become the sea or sky of the scenes, life at sea and smoking, both aspirational and dangerous.