HEARTSHIP was commissioned by ‘Sounds From a Safe Harbour’, a bi-annual music festival in Cork, Ireland. It was created to honour the many migrant people who disappear below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea; their drowned hearts lying unnamed on the sea-bed. Heartship also celebrated the Irish Naval services contribution to the humanitarian crisis, where they saved many lives.

In September 2019 the LÉ James Joyce sailed up the river Lee in Cork from the naval base on Haulbowline Island. A lone figure, the singer Lisa Hannigan, was visible wandering on board, wrapped in a silver thermal blanket. Her beautiful, ethereal voice emanated from the ship, recorded with the sounds of glass armonica and water-phone played by Alasdair Malloy. A relic of a human heart was harboured within the ship – a sacred cargo. When the ship anchored upstream an audience gathered on the dockside to hear Lisa Hannigan perform alone from the top deck. 

The relic of a human heart which was placed on board the ship was found in a crypt in Cork City in 1863 and acquired by General Pitt Rivers, the ethnologist and archaeologist, who was then stationed there. It later became part of the extraordinary collection of artefacts which are housed in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. When found, the heart was encased in a lead cyst in the walls of the crypt – the person within whom the heart beat is unknown and undated. We borrowed the heart for one day for Heartship.