Gateway to British Art Prize 2025
First place: Laura Palmisano
The ship in the diorama leans into a wind no one can feel. Its sails strain, its rigging is pulled tight, and the paper sea beneath it seems caught between breaths. This is the HMS Defiance (1744), preserved in paper by Augustine Walker in 1762. Little is known about Walker himself, but his delicate maritime scenes still surface in galleries and auctions. As I gazed upon the ship, I found myself waiting for the sails to stir.
I never expected a piece of art to feel so much like home.
My father has been building ship models for longer than I’ve been alive. He’s never called it art. He doesn’t talk about what it means to him. He isn’t the kind of man who hands out feelings in full sentences. But I grew up with sawdust on the floor and the smell of glue in the air. I remember the sound of his steady focus filling the family room. I used to think it was silence. Now I know it was love.
He learned the craft from his grandfather, who had learned it from his own father before him. Generations of men in my family have been building ships they’d never sail, men who didn’t always have the language for tenderness but had the patience and steady hands to create. They carved what they couldn’t say.
The first time I saw Walker’s paper diorama, I didn’t just see a ship. I saw my father, his shoulders hunched over a workbench, fingers steady, jaw set. I saw my great-grandfather too, and all the men before him, including Augustine Walker himself. I saw an inheritance: love and devotion that take shape as craft.
My father always tucks a piece of himself into every ship. Sometimes it’s hidden in an initial beneath a deck plank. Sometimes it’s a tiny figure carved to look like him, climbing the rigging or standing watch at the rail. It’s his way of being part of the imagined world he’s built. I studied Walker’s Defiance, wondering if he did the same, if somewhere in that paper ship, among these sailors, he left a small version of himself. Something only the ship would know.
The closer I looked, the more Walker’s world came alive. The gunports line the hull like clenched teeth. The rigging is impossibly delicate, tense, as if it’s holding the whole thing together with a single breath. Then I studied the sailors, some mid-climb, their bodies leaning into the mast. You can see the urgency in the way they reach upward, faces tense with emotion so small you have to look closely to name it. Even the distant ship that could easily be overshadowed carries pieces of the story’s heart.
The Defiance once helped ignite a war, but here it isn’t fighting. Walker caught it in motion, the wind alive around it yet everything suspended in stillness.
Sometimes imagined worlds aren’t built to escape. Sometimes they’re built to say what can’t be said out loud. My father builds ships to keep something steady, as his grandfather did. And maybe Walker, centuries before, had been doing the same. That’s one of the most beautiful things about these imagined worlds: they outlive the people who made them.
The ship in the gallery doesn’t move. It doesn’t need to. I can feel the wind. I can hear the creak of rope, the breath of the men climbing, the silence my father wrapped around me like sailcloth. All the words he didn’t say are here, tucked into a paper sea.
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