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