Kepler’s Klepper
2010
kayak/camera obscura, preparatory drawings and video
In 1907, the German tailor Johann Klepper introduced his design for a folding kayak with a collapsible, skeletal, wood frame assembled inside a skin of rubber and canvas. The Klepper kayak has for the most part maintained the same design since that
time and has been used both as a recreation boat and in solo, Atlantic crossings. Donald Lawrence’s use of the Klepper kayak for coastal excursions– in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides; the eastern coast of Maine; Tasmania, Australia; and the coast of British Columbia– informs his prevailing interest in the meeting place of urban and “wilderness” cultures.
For his Kepler’s Klepper project Lawrence fitted a Klepper Aerius I folding kayak (built in the mid-1960s) with a custom-designed, camera obscura enclosure. The life-sized apparatus lets in light through a lens and inverts the image of the surrounding view. The paddler inside the darkened space of the camera obscura must navigate by way of this inverted projected image. Created during a 2011 residency for the Tasmanian Biennale entitled “Ten Days On the Island,” the 10 minute video A Camera Obscura on the Tamar was taken along the Tamar River by way of a video camera on a raft, towed behind the kayak. The video shows Lawrence carefully navigating through the upside down landscape, guided by his sensorial experience.
The transformation of the otherwise efficient structure of a sea kayak into a camera obscura results in a vessel that is ambiguously utilitarian and sculptural, similar to earlier works by Lawrence, including: The Sled (1995), the Kayak/Darkroom (1998)
and One Eye Folly (2008). This hybrid vessel draws on German astronomer/astrologer and mathematician Johannes Kepler’s 17th century experiments and theories that were essential to early considerations of the camera obscura as a model of human perception. The fusion of recreation and experimentation explores the relationship between learning and play that is central to Lawrence’s practice. The title of the work is a tongue twister that references the converging influence of both Klepper and Kepler in this project.
