The Long Haul, 2023

Photos by Andrew Lewis

This triptych is documentation from a performance I did in December of 2023. I wore a pair of transparent oil pants that I fabricated with the help of my grandmother, and “hauled rope” from the boat that was resting in her backyard. This work was meant to respond to my late grandfather’s belief that women were bad luck aboard fishing vessels. Curious about the potential origins of this superstition, I decided to look into the history behind that belief. During my research, I came across the common practice of carving nude/partially women as the figureheads of large ships. They were favored in part because they were said to calm the seas/appease the gods to allow for a safe voyage. I decided to borrow from this imagery and transform myself into a symbol of good luck. Every day that I am on the water I am engaging in an act of defiance. I am holding space that would have otherwise been denied to me because of my gender. The Long Haul interrogates ideas of gendered labour and insists that if I must be differentiated in a space, I will proudly display that while I am not a cis-man, I am a fisherman.

This work is part of a series that includes She Tows the Line, Bound, and Domain.