A contemporary cruise liner offers thousands of activities for the ultimate luxury getaway equipped with cinemas, swimming pools, fitness centres, spa treatments and fine dining. The ‘moving city on the sea’ allows for tourists to experience a luxury all-inclusive holiday in which every need is catered for to allow for a level of relaxation that is unique.
Monarch of the Sea explores how the modern cruise liner can be adapted to be more fantastical, daring and exploratory, offering a new level of luxury where tourists are entertained whilst travelling on a mechanized pedal cart system spanning entire breadth of the liner. The current cruise liner industry is often damaging with enormous CO2 output and visual scarring to tourist sites, such themes of sustainability and tradition are explored in the drawing with satire and a sense of humour referencing fairytales such as La Belle et la Bête by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont.
The long section is an adaptation of the 1914 White Star Line, R.M.S Majestic, previously the largest ocean liner in the world and reimagines the interior spaces to be large voids filled with gardens, libraries, theatres and aquariums. There is nostalgia in the drawing with reference to ‘the golden age’ of cruise liners as well as modern technologies such as algae farming, wind power and cable car systems. The work seeks to explore the theatre of the cruise liner typology and the performance of life on the water.