When You Invent the Ship, You Also Invent the Shipwreck is a stream of images from the past 25 years of Peter Funch’s vast archive. Images created around the world, with different potentials, all motivated by a hungry curiosity. Images composed with an array of image capturing tools, digital and analogue, some heavily reworked, others straight from the negative. Interconnecting with images of passages of texts from an eclectic collection of writers. When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck is a visual odyssey that engages you in media res. Leaving behind the concept of traditional time; past – present – future – for a prevailing feeling of now. The work unfolds differently with each journey from eye through mind.

A sense of emancipation emanates from the book – images set free from restraining concepts and categories – born again into this world of endless images. This feeling of sustainable revolution is enhanced by the book production and title. The book is printed on dead stock left from other publications produced by the craftwomen and men at Narayana Press. A process that somehow sets the work free, as the look and feel of the book is released and left to chance.

The title is a recycled fragment of a Paul Virilio quote, in the present context a reminder of the cyclical nature of creation and destruction. Constant transformation.