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Field Trip 2: Boat Party

Lucy Gunning and Tacita Dean were students together at Falmouth School of Art in the 80s. For a year they were also neighbours and when Lucy finished and moved to London they tried to correspond with each other by sending postcards every day. For this field trip they decided ‘to map a more biographical route around the coastal outline of Falmouth’ and each started by drawing a sketch map of the area as she remembered it, indicating the sites that were of most significance at that time. They drew their maps without reference to each other and were struck by how different they were – one drawn from the perspective of the sea, the other concentrating on the land.

The field trip group was similarly divided into two parties, one led by Lucy on foot, the other travelling with Tacita by boat across Falmouth bay. Lucy Gunning’s walking route joined sites she used to inhabit while she was a student: the sculpture department at Woodlane, the dell of rhododendruns that she once used to create a sculpture and Bar Terrace where she and Tacita lived. The two parties set out to communicate with each other – as Lucy and Tacita had done with postcards – by signalling with mirrors between land and sea at key points on the journey – Falmouth docks, Castle Beach and Gyllyngvase Beach.