Vessel to Vassel - a Solo - in Gozo

Vessel to Vassal brings together new, recent and selected earlier drawings, prints and sculpture by British artist Pete Codling. The exhibition reflects a personal and creative journey between Portsmouth, Malta and Gozo during several years of change, using maritime imagery, mythology and self-portraiture to explore passage, emotional containment, isolation, preservation and release.

The bottle is a long-established motif within Codling’s work. It recalls the familiar message in a bottle and ship in a bottle, but replaces the expected contents with human figures, angels, animals, objects and memories. The contents become the message. The transparent bottle may protect, preserve and transport, but it may also confine, isolate or display what it holds. It becomes shelter, ark, reliquary, incubator and prison.

The title describes a shifting relationship between container and contents. A vessel carries and controls what is placed within it, while the figure inside becomes dependent upon its passage. Yet the relationship can also reverse. A vessel may become vassal to the people, memories and responsibilities it is required to carry.

A key new drawing responds to Sansuna, the giantess of Gozitan folklore associated with carrying the great stones of Ġgantija. She introduces a contrasting image of physical agency, parenthood, burden and cultural inheritance.

Selected works from Codling’s earlier practice, including bottle imagery and the Ark series, establish that voyage, human and animal cargo, preservation and psychological vulnerability have occupied his work for many years. The exhibition brings these works into a new dialogue with Gozo, personal transition and the uncertain condition of being both carrier and carried.

Like any traveller, explorer or artist, Codling sometimes feels that he is steering his own course, while at other times he is carried by circumstance, by other people, by physical and emotional weather, and by the unpredictable currents of fate.