LONDON, ENGLAND.-Aspex Gallery is collaborating for the first time with the Royal Naval Museum to create a series of contemporary art commissions entitled, The Nelson Touch, in the period around the Bicentenary Celebrations of the Battle of Trafalgar and Nelson’s death. The collaboration presages Aspex’s move to its new dockyard site, the Vulcan Building in Gunwharf Quays early next year. The exhibition investigates the Nelson phenomena, characterised by the multitude of events taking place under the umbrella title, ‘Sea Britain: Trafalgar Festival’ and looks at the relevance of Nelson and his achievements to contemporary society and the fact and fiction surrounding his extraordinary career.

It asks the questions: Why is Nelson still remembered and feted today? Is the celebration specific to naval and sailing communities, or is Nelson’s memory also important to the public at large? Why is Nelson of such appeal to biographers and naval historians? Why was he significant and what is his legacy in political, economic, social and cultural terms? It looks at the mythology surrounding Nelson’s extraordinary life, his heroism, leadership qualities, political profiling, as well as his personal phenomena through the practice of contemporary artists.

Two artists have been selected owing to their interest in working with historical context and the public sphere. Helen Maurer will create a telescope acting as a “camera obscura” - projecting a small image of a scene outside the building on to a flat surface inside the museum. In the Historic Dockyard she will hang a message, such as “turn a blind eye”, encoded in flags. The installation will be complemented with archive footage of events and marches shot in Trafalgar Square, the site of Nelson’s Column. Helen Maurer’s practice is a process-based, experimental one that links time, place and memory, challenging our way of seeing. Much of her work involves the use of lenses playing with refraction, reflection and magnification. For The Nelson Touch she extends these techniques and references historical methods of image production.

Sarah Woodfine will construct a 3D drawing based on the Battle of Trafalgar, meticulously detailing its formal decay whilst exploring her own imaginative interpretation of the event. She has drawn her inspiration from the Lily Lambert McCarthy collection of Nelson paintings, artefacts and memorabilia which is displayed at the Royal Naval Museum. Fascinated by models of 19thC sailing ships and the physicality of shipbuilding as well as the naval tactics and battle formations, her work will explore the phenomena of war and the post-battle situation. Her practice of drawing bears an uncanny resemblance to the etchings and engravings of the period. She does not seek perfect or accurate representations of objects, but is rather concerned to suggest just enough detail for the viewer to complete the narrative.

Helen Maurer and Sarah Woodfine have exhibited at Aspex Gallery before, in an exhibition entitled In Splendid Isolation in 2002. Despite the fact they work in different media, there are symmetries and correspondences between their work. Both are engaged in the presentation of other worlds by means of illusionistic devices and rely on found (photographic or printed images) as starting points for their works. The artists have immersed themselves in the history of Nelson and the physicality of the experience, seeming to transport themselves back in time to harness an authenticity about the event. Helen has seen it as an opportunity to extend her practice and using lenses is able to experiment with the affects of light and glass in a different form. Sarah is interested in the intricacies of the subject and the interplay between the historical and the contemporary. Their work operates on a number of different levels: it references the past, it returns to the past, it is concerned with the physicality of the past and it intervenes in the museum display.

The Nelson Touch is curated by Victoria Preston in collaboration with the Aspex Gallery and the Royal Naval Museum and supported by SeaBritain, the Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust, the Portsmouth Community Chest, John McCarthy, Ron Robinson Compass Adjusters and Goldsmiths College, University of London.