DAZZLE

How to camouflage ships at sea was one of the big questions of WW1. Many artists, naturalists and inventors showered the offices of the United States Navy and the British Royal Navy with largely impractical suggestions on making ships invisible. A discussion of disguising ships as whales was taken somewhat seriously.

Eventually dazzle camouflage was created by a division of British naval men that made up the Dazzle Section. A fitting name for a band, matched with a ‘Kiss’ esque solution to camouflage. Made up of startling stripes and irregular abstract shapes the pattern was designed to confuse enemy ships rather than act as a disguise.

On my lunchtime travels around Battersea I eventually bumped into a dazzle camouflaged boat situated nicely in shot of the Battersea Power Station. By this point I had been working in the area for close to six months and felt I had covered every nook and cranny in search of anything that resembled camouflage. However, I had missed the conveniently placed boat. In similar fashion to a canvas it was only painted on one side. The side facing away from Battersea Park.

I moved into my studio space in Battersea on the 5th of August 2023. Come October, the Battersea Power Station reopened after laying dormant for close to forty years. Despite missing the dazzle camouflaged boat initially, I was aware from early on that the branding across the Battersea Power Station closely resembled dazzle camouflage. From the boardings around the exterior to unopened shops, black and white stripes are prominent across the entirety of the beast of a building. All be it, in this instance the stripes are used to guide oncoming shoppers as opposed to misleading incoming war ships.

I instantly had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to create. The first task was drawing up an accurate silhouette of the boat in question. From there, I constructed an overlapping pattern as I would ordinarily, only for the pattern to be disrupted by the outline of the boat. I wasn’t sure how it would come out but I had decided I wasn’t fussed on wether the boat either stood out or blended in with the pattern. Somewhere in between I felt was the perfect outcome.