FreePort [No. 004]: Peter Hutton

Peter Hutton has spent nearly 40 years voyaging across the world to create meditative, intimate and luminously photographed film studies of place. At Sea (2004-2007, 60 min.) depicts the life cycle of a container ship - from mechanized construction in a Korean shipyard, to a late winter journey across the Atlantic, and ending with the manual labor of ship breakers on the shores of Bangladesh. The title of the film evokes a loss of perspective, a metaphor born from the experience of a sea journey and its ability to strip us of our sense of scale, time and distance. At Sea is a sweeping meditation on global commerce, labor, geography and the experience of merchant ship travel in the 21st-century. Accompanying the film is a highly detailed model depicting the ship-breaking of an industrial tanker. Commissioned specifically for this exhibition, it may be the only such model of its kind in existence.