Australian artist Sally Smart was intrigued by ships and pirates but hesitated to use them in her art, with the romanticized images of crossbones and eye patches being too cliché. So she took a different route, exploring the rarely mentioned role of female pirates. Her visually stunning, creative interpretation of pirates plays with notions of feminine identity and stock images of galleons and the high seas.

Smart constructs her ships and pirates out of cutout fabric, felt and photographs, which are then stained, painted, silk screened and stitched together. Whenever the exhibition arrives at a new gallery (since 2005, the show has traveled to 10 countries), Smart unpacks everything and pins the materials directly on to the gallery wall. The process ensures originality. In fact, Smart incorporates pieces of fabric from each place she visits.

The Shanghai exhibition showcases six ships and several female pirates. Smart investigated the hidden history of female pirates and learned that English, Irish and even Chinese women were once pirates. In the early 19th century, the infamous Chinese woman Ching Shih, a former prostitute who married a pirate, built her own empire in the South China Sea. One of the most compelling pieces is a ship called “Oceania”.

The fabrics are mostly dark with striking smatterings of blues, pinks and reds. The mast is an intertwining labyrinth of thin fabric strips, arranged in a crisscrossing pattern. The bow resembles a woman’s form. Legs, arms, breasts and braided hair are inverted and duplicated, giving the work a surrealist quality. That process of deconstructing the boundaries of what defines a ship and a woman takes on a greater meaning for Smart, as she challenges the assumptions that are attached to piracy–from today’s romanticized images to the faulty absence of female pirates from our history books.

Kellie Schmitt

Smart’s technique of layering painted felt-cutouts seems almost casual but this light-touch belies subtle experimentation with the nature and experience of form and colour. This is something in the same sphere as Braque and Picasso’s papier colles but also of Hans Alber’s Interaction of Colour and even the flat spatial renderings of early Renaissance art. Smart presents these forms as a series of colour elements, some textured, some not. Some play with trompe l’oeil, such as the wooden decking of the ships (a nod to cubism), while other images subvert that trick (the ungainly midget pirate, a parody of the Conradian type, refers to Wayang shadow puppets from the Andaman Sea, stands on top of the water, ignoring the aesthetic space in which he exists). The way we experience these differing colour elements is with a sense of perspective. The flat colour and shape of the ship’s foreshortened bow and masts has an optical depth, one accentuated by the white background of the wall (and the grid, don’t forget) but also by the contrasting colours of other transecting elements. This is to say that flat colour can have the appearance of three-dimensional space, and this affects not only our formal understanding of the work but also its content. The logic is something akin to that expressed by Yve-Alan Bois in his writings on scale and line in Matisse’s drawings. Colour has an optical space, besides that derived from its transparency, arising from its relative contrast with neighboring colours, which in turn is affected by the relative scale of the contrasting areas of colour. Accordingly a large area of black is ‘blacker’, more intense, than a small area of exactly the same shade, texture and saturation. Going further, particular combinations of colour can vibrate and energize an image. This is what Albers was getting at with his colour variations using the matt-hue effects of silkscreen printing. The spatial disorientation this causes concentrates how we experience the artwork.

This brings us back to the matter of the map, the purpose of which is to control space, to understand and to claim it. Maps are usually flat renderings of real space. Here the real space of the gallery and that of the map are congruent, a sincere subversion of cartography – the map maps itself and its space is real. The title refers to the Surrealist Map of the World, which reconfigured geography according to the artists’ whims, political, critical, psychological and humorous. Thus the formal nature of Smart’s work, its dizzying optical strategy, mixing shape and colour, sets us up for its content, a blur of competing associations: real hair swirls in the water; as kelp, as Leonardian motion and Melvillian memorial to a drowned sailor. A sail recycles a pair of jeans, both workaday clothes and fashion item. A rope is a pirate’s pigtail and a feminine symbol. Silhouettes form coasts of countries, real and imaginary, colonial and corrupt. Subjectivity here is a kaleidoscope of conflicting perspectives, but doesn’t all mapping involve an element of distortion?

Note also the word ‘exquisite’, such a delicate term for use in conjunction with corsairs. It refers to the Surrealist game of ‘Exquisite Corpse’ where an artist draws a body part, without being able to see those drawn by her co-artists, in order to create an ‘exquisite’ Frankenstein’s monster, something more than the sum of its parts. ‘Exquisite’ though also raises decorous notions of the feminine. Smart is subverting the macho pirate cliché with a sassy dollop of truth - examples of women pirates abound. In China alone there were numerous women pirates, particularly from colonialism to the 1950s, when the Communists halted piracy.

One of the inspirations for the exhibition is Kathy Ackers’ final novel, Pussy King of the Pirates, a subversive re-telling of Treasure Island. We note that the sea is a she, as are ships (vessels), but also that pirate ships are illegal, unauthorized: rogue women. Remember that anatopic pirate? - on closer inspection ‘he’ is actually a ‘she’. Luce Irigaray’s conception of female space, one that exceeds (male/Freudian) categorization is apposite. Irigaray first enunciated it in her Speculum of the Other Woman through a Joycean ventriloquism, embodying male ‘philosophers’ from Plato to Freud in order to criticize them. Here lies the brilliance of this evolving exhibition. Behind the umpteen allusions and parodies lies a cerebral consideration of colour and space, and behind that, an even more subtle consideration of philosophical and sexual space, at which point the parodic metaphors really begin to take shape. Now the fabric cut-outs can be taken down and sail to another port, taking with them their space, and leaving the gallery walls naked and ravished.

Chris Moore