In the wake of Louise Arner Boyd
My relationship with the sea has always been, and still is, tinged with trepidation and fear. I find the sea/ocean sublime in every sense of its meaning – from the calm to the horror of the storm. I cannot fathom it either physically or philosophically. It remains a mystery even though oceanographers have mapped/charted the surfaces and the deep. During the past four years I have made a series of voyages in the wake of the American explorer Louise Arner Boyd who sailed several times to the Arctic between 1924-36. Outside America she is virtually unknown. I kept logbooks, journals, photographs and drawings that trace and record my voyages.
I told an artist friend that I was following in the wake of Louise Arner Boyd and she said “my dear, you don’t follow in anyone’s wake - you make your own”.
Voyage 4, Expedition to Louise Boyd Land, East Greenland, August 2018
For this expedition I hired the SS OPAL with the sole intention of landing on Louise Boyd Land located between the Jette Glacier and the Gerard de Geer Glacier in the National Park of East Greenland. On 1 September I landed on Louise Boyd Land and to my knowledge am the first woman (possibly the first person) to do so. The expedition was in the wake of Boyd’s boat the Veslekari, using her original charts and re-photographing some of the geographic locations that Boyd photographed.
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Voyage 3, Scoresby Sund, Greenland, August 2016
For this voyage I flew with my husband Chris Wainwright from London Heathrow to Reykjavic, Iceland. We were booked to sail on the SS OPAL around Scoresby Sund, Greenland on the beautiful two masted (electric) Icelandic sailing schooner owned by North Sailing.
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Voyage 2, Svalbard, August 2015
In April, 2015, one year after my first voyage in the wake of Louise Arner Boyd, and after my Confirmation (upgrade to PhD), I travelled with my husband Chris Wainwright to the Arctic to renew my re/search for evidence of Boyd’s explorations this time flying to Longyearbyen, Svalbard (formerly Spitzbergen) in an attempt to land at Pyramiden.
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Voyage 1, Bergen - Kirkenes - Bergen, February 2014
In February 2014 I left on an 11day research voyage to follow in the wake of Louise Arner Boyd aboard the Norwegian postal ship MS Kong Harald from Bergen-Kirkenes-Bergen. The intention of this voyage was to find out whether Boyd’s presence as an arctic explorer would be evident in the Polar Museum in Tromsø alongside the figures of Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen especially as Boyd played such an active role in the search for Amundsen after his disappearance in1928.
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