Out and About: BONE-A-COD at Langstane Gallery

"Bone-a-cod! It taks me a' my time to bone a Haddie!" The line comes from an Aberdeen fishwife's response to the city's motto, Bon-Accord. It's a moment of linguistic rebellion, a working woman's retort to civic pomposity, and it gives Marie-Chantal Hamrock's new exhibition its title and its angle.

BONE-A-COD uses printmaking, sculptural props and film to examine the lingering presence of fishing in Aberdeen while considering the lived realities of the industry in Peterhead and Fraserburgh. The work sits at the intersection of place, class and gender, drawing out histories that have been overwritten or left unfulfilled.

Speculative intersections

Hamrock's approach is speculative rather than documentary. Through imaginal world-building and semi-fictional narratives, the exhibition creates space for stories that don't fit into official histories. Props and performances become tools for activating these alternate narratives, allowing the past to be reimagined rather than simply recorded.

The work forms part of Hamrock's practice-based PhD at Gray's School of Art, where she's exploring class, place and gender in the North-East's maritime cultures. Her research blurs the line between the real and the imagined, treating folk tradition and feminist inquiry as methods for understanding local history.

Aberdeen's fishing heritage is everywhere and nowhere: monuments and street names remain, but the industry itself has largely moved north. BONE-A-COD sits in that gap, asking what happens when a city's maritime past becomes decorative rather than lived.