The Passenger

I have a favorite book of Maritime art. I became fascinated in the exaggeration in the old maps

Built on known points, much of them was filled with what was imagined was there.

The Passenger was based on my own journey through a difficult time. I figured we all have this kind of journey in our lives. I wanted the composition to be like a compass. The fuselage to be like a cross section of a ship. With all my imaginary cargo. The plane is based on a DC3. This kind of aircraft was used in 1948 to re supply berlin during the Soviet blockade. Many of the pilots that flew these mercy flights, had during the war dropped bombs on the same city

I brought these things together in, what I hoped would be an interesting piece for reflection. Als in the cargo, are some maritime navigational aids. I worked for a while as a Nav Tech doing lighthouse maintenance in Bass Strait. On our crew was an engineer who carried a contraption on his back that looked like a vacuum cleaner

I asked him what it was and what he was doing, he explained that it was for the maritime GPS system and his job was to re calibrate the imaginary earth ellipse. That’s part of it to.