The Artists

Eleanor Taylor and Jessica Darch are both practising artists. They met during their Architecture BA Degree in London. Since then they have worked together on several mural commissions. Jessica works predominantly as an acrylic abstract multi media artist. Eleanor is an illustrator, printmaker and independent teacher.

Working collaboratively with the children of Gibraltar has been an enormous privilege and inspiration. We are grateful to Gibraltar Cultural Services for their support.

• 

• 

the workshop and mural

I first had the idea for the ‘Boat Called Hope’ project for children last year while walking on the beaches of Bolonia and Barbate. While being enthralled by the beautiful wooden boats that sit in the sand along that coast I was also struck by the human stories that are held in those hulls. The untold stories of journeys and of freedoms. As a family we took it upon ourselves to break up sections of the scuppered ‘pateras’ as they are locally known and carry fragments home. I knew that I wanted to make an artwork out of them. The children have loved making  boats, giving them names such as ‘Hope’ and ‘Freedom’. They talked with such empathy and insight about what these words embodied in Human Rights meant to them. The act of making these ‘driftwood’ boats has given us all the chance to decide to be fair, to feel that justice and freedom is important to us all. It has given the children a chance to make their artistic thoughts manifest and has given us all confidence in our power to make things happen. It has been a whole heartedly positive project focussing on the beauty of family, safety, security etc – everything we hold dear, particularly in these unsettled times. I know that Gibraltar, more than many places in the world is acutely conscious of this. Eleanor

Eleanor Roosevelt’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”

Eleanor Roosevelt 1948