Shipwright Francesc Preto built his last boat inland, with the intention of housing a naturist community. Arcalís creates archaeological fictions with the flotsam of her great grandfather’s shipwreck, using the traces of a utopia that is yet to become alive.

Oriol Fontdevila

Menorca-born and London-based artist Erola Arcalís presents works that are two-dimensional, successfully exploring the sensation of time against the sensibilities of the landscape and enabling and offering the present and future a platform on which to apply itself. Shipwreck Studies (2017–22) comprises photographic works that are deliciously difficult to read as they sink into their own swell of water. Intentionally including nothing of the horizon, they appear as abstracted images that are timeless, as is the condition of the water. Conceived of by an artist drawing on her interests in narrative and the nature of memory as a motioned experience, they offer her audience these tonal representations of reality, as recorded by the artist’s choice of images.

One of the smaller works in the series is pinned to the wall, as though having been washed up by the water – a self-contained photograph of Francesc Petro building his last ship (1981). A man stands on a wooden frame, with the pieces stretched out in front of him as he singlehandedly builds the pictured boat for his own story of the Mediterranean. With his exact identity omitted from the label, we are intrigued into a desire to introduce the man to our own lives.

Rajesh Punj, Canvas Art Review

Shipwreck Studies is inspired by a collection of found objects that used to belong to my great-grandfather. A ship builder and a man of unconventional thinking, his last project was the construction of a 26 meters long ship that was to become a communal living space. The vessel, made with reclaimed materials from the sea, was to remain moored in the middle of a rocky field in the island of Menorca.

Just some years after its construction in the seventies, an unexpected fire destroyed it. Different stories are shared about the cause, but whether provoked or accidental, the flames burnt the ship almost entirely, leaving only a few traces of the little utopia. Thirty years on I went back to the same place and gathered few of the flotsam, wreckage and surviving objects with the intention to transform them into a series of sculptures.