Philip Napier: Unpacking The Terror is the second of an annual series in which The Dock focuses on the work of an artist based in Northern Ireland. Napier’s project explores a connection between the civil engineering of future space of the estate of Northern Ireland and the imminent opening up of the North West Passage as a major seaway in the ‘high north’ of the Arctic linking Europe to the far and near east. In our time the passage is gradually opening as a major international highway due to global warming and the shrinking of the ice sheet. The North West Passage has occupied a significant and shifting relationship in successive imaginations for both the potentials of hard edged economic advantage and an imaginative spatial zone of discovery, terror and the romantic imagination.

Philip Napier is an artist and also currently the Head of Sculpture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Napier is a former Rome scholar and has represented Ireland in the XXII Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil, and Great Britain at the inaugural Kwangju Biennale in South Korea. He has shown widely internationally developing projects and manifestations often rerouteing meaning and power sited in situations of public realm debate.