18th July - 4th September 2021
MUDSKIPPER took up residency at Battersea Power Station, before travelling down the River Thames to the Royal Docks.

Demonstrations Dates
Friday 23rd July - Saturday 4th September 2021

Demonstrations took place on the North East section of the riverside, by Chelsea Bridge. In between demonstrations, MUDSKIPPER was moored by the Battersea Power Station Uber Boat by Thames Clippers pier for viewing.

Further demonstrations took place on the foreshore by Royal Victoria Gardens near Woolwich Pier. In between demonstrations MUDSKIPPER was moored in Royal Victoria Dock.

Co-Commissioned by
Battersea Power Station, Nine Elms on the South Bank and the Royal Docks Team

Supported by
Arts Council England, Rothschild Foundation, Hannah Barry Gallery, Albion Barn and Perkins Engines with additional support from the Science Museum Group and RoDMA (Royal Docks Management Authority)

Produced by
Illuminate Productions

MUDSKIPPER is a fully-mobile sculpture able to move across water and land through the use of two hydraulic step-type propulsion legs with component TREADPAD feet.

British artist James Capper will unveil his ambitious new work MUDSKIPPER, a large-scale mobile sculpture on Sunday 18 July 2021 at Battersea Power Station.

Co-commissioned by Battersea Power Station, Nine Elms on the Southbank and Royal Docks, the sculpture is a new work of art for the river with a series of live demonstrations taking place throughout the summer in Battersea and at the Royal Docks.

A former 1980s commercial Thames workboat, MUDSKIPPER, has been transformed by James Capper into a fully mobile sculpture (9.2 metres in length and 14.5 tons in weight), which has the ability to navigate across bodies of water and land the foreshore using a set of hydraulic jacks, offering passers-by the chance to see an experimental sculpture that crosses art, sciences and the speculative engineering divide.

Inspired by the evolution of the vertebrates, and echoing the brave leaps made by those into a new and unknown world, MUDSKIPPER challenges and invigorates the definitions of engineering and art and the interconnections between the two.

MUDSKIPPER’s ability to change its environment, combined with its engineered hydraulic jacks for land-based locomotion, gives the sculpture a brave and exigent new character on the water. In line with Capper’s practice, the amphibious sculpture explores the dynamic relationship between biological ingenuity, biomechanics, and the human. MUDSKIPPER also points to a greater journey or mission, recalling the eccentric personas of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo or Wes Anderson’s Steve Zissou, and confronting the precarity of human existence and our contemporary technological desires.

James has been planning The Walking Ship in numerous drawings since 2010. Most recently works added to this extensive project were the series of drawings Ten Ways to Make a Ship Walk published in 2016. The original idea was formed out of the surreal notion of the action of a ship or boat climbing out of the water very slowly, in a similar way to a crocodile sliding down a muddy African riverbank in the Sir David Attenborough film, Planet Earth. Its shape-shifting form of displacement and physicality, in combination with a slightly awkward method of locomotion gives the sculpture great potential as a new character on the River Thames and beyond.

An exhibition of a selection of the drawings was on show at the Good Hotel in the Royal Victoria Dock, plus an there was an opportunity to meet the artist, to discuss the development and making of Mudskipper.