Photo: Barbara Evripidou for Canal and River Trust

May Tanner (on far left), photo by Paul Blakemore

Photo: Canal and River Trust

Photo: Cliff Armstrong LPRS

Photo: Barbara Evripidou for Canal and River Trust

Photo: Canal and River Trust

Photo by Cliff Armstrong LPRS

Photo by Mark Atherton

Painted boat in studio

Illuminated boats in studio

Illuminated boats in studio

Illuminated boats in studio

Parveen Khan (on far right), photo by Ian Greenland

Crossings is an installation artwork by Luke Jerram in collaboration with BBC Radio4 producer Julian May, which was commissioned by Compton Verney for its first presentation during summer 2022.

The installation consists of 9 rowing boats on the water. Each of the boats plays audio of stories from around the world. In choosing a story and rowing out into the water for 30 minutes participants are taken on an audio journey, transported to another life and circumstance. The action of rowing and the live sounds this action creates, blends with the recorded audio, to help create a truly engaging and immersive experience.

The boats are decorated with imagery relating to the stories.

The artwork is now touring to other venues to be presented in lakes, canals and docklands across the UK. Contact us if your organisation is interested in presenting this artwork.

Past Presentations:
Around the Lake Festival, Crawley, UK
Weston Literature Festival, Weston-Super-Mare, UK
Weston Arts + Health Weekender, Weston-Super-Mare, UK
Whirligig Festival, Weston-Super-Mare, UK
National Waterways Museum, Gloucester, UK
Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK

Recorded Stories include:

• Mana Azarish tells the story of how, aged 13, she guided, navigating by the stars, a rickety boat full of refugees across the British Channel. Listen here.
• Marine Biologist Professor Steve Simpson tells the story of how by replaying underwater recordings of marine life, his team help to revive life in the coral reefs. Listen here.
• A crew of three women tell their story of making a currach in memory of a friend and sister, and rowing it in Ireland’s long distance Ocean to City race. Listen here.
• Broadcaster Andy Kershaw took a steamer along the Niger to find his friend, the late, great Malian bluesman Ali Farka Touré, and went with him to Timbuktu. Andy recounts his adventures on the way – a singing boatman, Ali’s gift of a sheep (to eat), and trip in a dangerously leaky pirogue with ‘the Grand Griot’. Listen here.
• Fishing with cormorants. Richard King on Ukai, a traditional Japanese fishing technique in which fishermen use trained cormorants to catch fish in rivers. With haiku in Japanese and English read by Togo Igawa. Listen here.
• Jo Royle who to draw attention to the plastic rubbish floating in the oceans co-designed the Plastiki, a boat constructed from 12,500 recycled 2 litre plastic bottles, and skippered her on a voyage from San Francisco to Sydney. Listen here.
• Mr Fan, a barber in Greenwich, who was one of the Boat People, refugees from Vietnam. He left for Hong Kong with his young family on a sailing boat that no one aboard knew how to sail. A voyage that should have taken a week or so lasted three months. Within sight of the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, storms blew them back to where they came from. Listen here.
• When Captain Cook arrived in Tahiti people were eating sweet potatoes. But these come from South America. Professor Steven Hooper tells the story of Polynesian navigators who sailed in fast canoes, held together by rope, across the Pacific to South America – and back again, bringing sweet potatoes, now a staple food in the Pacific islands, with them. Listen here.
• When Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was crushed by the Antarctic ice and sank, he lead his crew to Elephant Island, where they lived for months under two upturned longboats. Shackleton, with five men, went to get help, sailing the 23’ James Caird 800 miles across the roughest seas in the world, to South Georgia. Seb Coulthard has made the same journey in a boat the same size…and survived to tell the story. Listen here.
• Neil Trevithick has sailed the Atlantic solo. But he nearly drowned not alone, miles from land, but in London, a city of nine and a half million people, when his dinghy capsized near the Thames Barrier. Listen here.
• Marking the 75th anniversary year of the NHS and of Windrush, this is the story of May Tanner who became the first black ward sister at Bristol Royal Infirmary.  Hear how May, age 91 at the time of recording,  set sail to England from Barbados in 1956, responding to the call to help re-build a country whose ‘mother’ language, traditions and songs had filled her school days. This story was commissioned by University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust and Super Culture in 2023. Listen here.
• The Odyssey of Parveen Khan is a story made especially for Around the Lake Festival in Crawley, July 2024. Parveen tells the story of how she came to be in Crawley, the town she has called home for 12 years, from the mountains of Kashmir via many inspiring adventures as a young Muslim woman, alone, on a journey crossing the world. Listen here.

Press Coverage

BBC News read
The Observer review by Kate Kellaway read
The Times read
The Telegraph mention

Symbolism of boats
Boats can be a form of transport, a vehicle to enable work, a method of escape, a tool of employment. They are a way of connecting people and places.  They can simply be an object of leisure. Boats are symbolic of journeying into the unknown and of the journey of life.

With Thanks
Funding for this artwork has come from the Arts Council of England and Compton Verney.

Being on a boat that’s moving through the water, it’s so clear. Everything falls into place in terms of what’s important and what’s not.

James Taylor

We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean.

Anna Freud