Mike Ricketts | The Vessel

Mike Ricketts’ The Vessel shared the story of the UK’s only prison ship of modern times, Her Majesty’s Prison The Weare.

Like its subject, the artwork The Vessel was an assemblage of diverse components, and has had several different iterations, ranging from a performance on a cliff top overlooking a former berth in Portland Port to a film and exhibition of artefacts detailing the artist’s attempts to access, photograph and track this barge, and explores the strange status the vessel has developed over its eventful life. The Vessel’s offshore status and questions of legality and visibility are central to the project.

Decommissioned in 2005 and for several years located in Portland Harbour, Dorset, England, the vessel, now known as Jascon 27, was last known to be home to five hundred oil workers in the Niger Delta. The projects’ film took the audience from Sweden to the Falkland Islands, from Germany to Manhattan, and involved engineers, ship spotters, prisoners, soldiers, and the artist’s brother, Chris. Composed entirely of appropriated material, Ricketts’ film was framed in an exhibition using sections of television news footage about the vessel, ephemera and a small curated display of other artists’ paintings of the prison ship, specially loaned for the exhibition.

Together this interwoven set of personal artistic studies and sightings of the barge in popular media portrayed the vessel not simply as a dumb container for the pragmatic housing of men but as a peculiar object of fascination for artists, journalists and enthusiasts that has grown in both intrigue and a peculiar potency the more we scrutinise its mute exterior.