KENDAL.- This autumn, Abbot Hall presents a solo exhibition by artist and Turner Prize winner Simon Starling. Opening on 20 September 2025, Boat Works brings together nearly all Starling’s works in which ‘the boat’ acts as the central character in stories of migration, metamorphosis, and change. Together, they offer an exciting opportunity to engage with the artist’s transformative practice.

Simon Starling's work is a process of physical and historical unravelling, where objects are transformed to trace their layered journeys and material histories. Through this act of metamorphosis, Starling's projects disrupt our assumptions about art and design, showing how an object's transformation can critically re-write the prevailing narratives of our shared past. This poetic act of material and contextual shift lies at the heart of Starling’s practice.

Across his career, Starling has returned to ‘the boat’ as a vehicle to tell these stories. Key highlights of the exhibition include major installations including Island for Weeds and Houseboat for Ho, works that exemplify this deep engagement with environmental, cultural, historical, and material narratives.

Key works in the exhibition include;

• Island For Weeds (2003): Island for Weeds is a floating platform made to hold a species of rhododendron that, while beautiful, is an invasive species across the UK. The artwork encourages us to think about how a plant brought in from elsewhere can settle in its new home. This sculpture connects the plant's journey to bigger ideas about migration and colonisation.

• Blue Boat Black (1997): As Simon Starling’s first boat work, the 1997 installation Blue Boat Black sets the stage for his decades-long investigation into material transformation. Beginning with a Victorian museum display case, which Starling rebuilt into a fishing boat from which he caught fish. Upon returning to shore, Starling turned the boat into charcoal, which was then used to cook the catch.

• Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006): Autoxylopyrocycloboros documents a four-hour journey on Loch Long on a small steamboat powered by wood cut piece-by-piece from its own hull. The artwork's title refers to the Ouroboros, a mythical serpent that eats its own tail. This symbolises the central idea of the work: a cyclical act of self-consumption. The artwork is presented as a series of 38 colour transparencies.

• Project for a Rift Valley Crossing (2015-2017): In the work Project for a Rift Valley Crossing, Simon Starling partook in the traditional, communal act of boat building to create a canoe made from magnesium extracted from Dead Sea water. The canoe was inspired by a British engineer who built lightweight bike frames using magnesium made from sea water. The artwork is a film that documents the artist's journey as he attempted to cross the Dead Sea in the canoe. This project reflects Starling's ongoing interest in the transformation of materials and circular journeys.

Boat Works also provides Starling with the opportunity to work with Lakeland Arts’ team of conservation boat builders, to produce a new work, plans and sketches of which will be on display at Windermere Jetty Museum. Boat Works will offer visitors an experience to engage with work that reflects Starling’s innovative and thought-provoking approach to making and meaning.

Simon Starling says “One of the great pleasures of making exhibitions of this kind is the way in which works, often familiar old favourites, made for, or in response to, very specific places, now find new voices and new conversations, both among a constellation of other such works and within the rich context of an historic building, its grounds, its nearby rivers, its boat-busy lakes and magnificent National Park. As stories collide and geographies are overlaid, the work live anew.”

Will Cooper, Senior Curator at Lakeland Arts states "I'm thrilled to be curating Simon Starling: Boat Works, an exhibition that re-examines the regionally familiar symbol of the boat in a completely new light. This is a unique opportunity for us to bring one of the UK’s most exciting artists to Kendal and to show a collection of works that have never been seen together before. Visitors to both Abbot Hall and Windermere Jetty Museum will be captivated by Simon’s use of boats to tell broad, interesting, and unexpected stories about history, materials, and transformation."

Starling has exhibited at prestigious venues including the 50th and 53rd Venice Biennales, and institutions such as the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Nottingham Contemporary, and Tate St Ives. Born in Surrey and now based in Copenhagen, Starling studied at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham (now Nottingham Trent University) and received his MFA from The Glasgow School of Art.