BOAT
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.
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Katherine Knight is a photographer and filmmaker who is particularly recognized for her landscape-based photographic works and documentary films on art and culture. Through her film company Site Media, Knight creates award-winning films on artists and creative process in relation to experiences of place that have played worldwide through festivals, television broadcast and post secondary distribution. Knight’s photographic works are held in many public and corporate collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Museum London, Global Affairs Canada, and the Canada Council Art Bank. She received the Duke and Duchess of York Prize from the Canada Council recognizing excellence in Photography. Knight lives in Pictou County, Nova Scotia.
