We Dream of Blue Whales is a map triptych made in response to a residency mapping whale sightings with oceanographers across 1300 miles of the North Atlantic. As part of the crew, I sailed a 22 metre sailing boat from Reykjavik in Iceland to Gothenburg in Sweden via Torshavn in the Faeroes.
Originally the map was designed to focus on stories of whales alone but in the end became about travellers' tales in general. The yarns narrated here were heard by me at some point over the month long journey and like the anecdotes of most seasoned rovers, it's hard to say whether they were all true or only partly true.
We saw so few whales ultimately that they became, in our heads, as mythical as the sea monsters that inhabit the travellers' tales of old.
