Out of the museum and into the wild, Katherine Knight’s photographs imagine model boats reconnected to their stories and sites of origin. Since 2015, she has been photographing model boats — imagining them at sea, on display, and in the changing weather of a maritime landscape. In this fascinating and highly original book, she teases out the allure of the boat model while also exploring the impulse to collect and the desire to tell stories in material form.
Knight’s camera knows no bounds. Her photographs include a tribute to a beloved dory, a memory of a passing ship, a mashup of several ferries, and a ship caught in the snow and ice — hand-crafted models linking places and people of the North Atlantic. Accompanied by first-person recollections and insights into model making, these models by builders across Atlantic Canada celebrate the tenacity and creativity of their makers and the stories that inspired them. At once the material residue of historical patterns of leisure and labour and resilient artifacts that linger on, these model boats bridge fact and fiction, reconnecting treasured artifacts to lived experience.
Guest essays by poet Sue Goyette, cultural historian Sara Spike, museum curator William Knight, and writer Peggy Gale intertwine with first person accounts by model makers, a ship’s captain, and others to create a unique record of lived experiences related to model boats.