The work in Navigation Lines is a bringing together of art practices: painting, sculpture and ceramics and also, conceptually rather than practically, jewellery and beads. These practices are carried together by the boats.

In 1998 I made a line of hollow boats that were light and floated on the Water of Leith. In these new boats there remains this memory of water: they expect relative movement, like the flow of water.

The boats are painted with a coloured liquid clay 'slip'. Clay exists in a continuum between liquid and solid. As a slip, clay is fantastically runny and opaque, then during drying, the clay becomes the perfect consistency to scrape and scratch through, revealing layers below. Even fired clay remembers the presence of water.

- Michael Tannock, July 2003.