James Dodds’ upcoming exhibition Love Is a Boat marks a new chapter in the artist’s ongoing exploration of boats, mythology, and the coastal traditions that have shaped his practice for decades. Opening 4 February 2026 at David Messum Fine Art Gallery, London, the show brings together a significant body of work created between 2024 and 2025, revealing a subtle but deliberate shift in Dodds’ visual language.
His boats are not just vessels of convenience but the means by which we can venture to other worlds of hope and redemption, and it is because of this that they are simply and hauntingly beautiful.”
Ken Worpole – Excerpt from Love is a Boat 2026 catalogue
What emerges is a sense of boats existing beyond any one place or moment — artefacts that hover between history, imagination, and something more archetypal. They feel lighter, more ethereal, and more suggestive, pointing towards stories held in tradition as much as in the personal act of making.
The exhibition’s accompanying catalogue features two essays: Love Is a Boat by Belinda Bamber, from which the show takes its title, and Boat or Ark by Ken Worpole, offering further insight into the cultural and symbolic weight carried by these new works.
Love Is a Boat runs at David Messum Fine Art Gallery, 12 Bury Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6AB, from 4–27 February 2026.
Exhibition catalogues are available to purchase for £15 from the David Messum Fine Art.
James Dodds 