Baugen — War Sailors' Monument

The conceptual starting point was an act of imagination: to picture what it was like that time, to stand in the bow of a ship while aircraft flew low overhead, hunting for mines in the sea below. That image shaped the work. The bow can be climbed, so that anyone can step up into the position of the lookout and take in the water the way the war sailors had to.

The work takes the form of a ship's bow, four metres high, driven up out of the rock as if the sea had just released it. Aluminium, fabricated at Marine Aluminium on Husøy, was chosen for the coast it stands on: a matte, hand-worked surface that holds the low northern light rather than mirroring it, and that will weather without ever softening the line of the stem.

A flight of steps rises through the hull to the height where a lookout would have stood, and each step carries a single sentence drawn from the war sailors' own words and from what was said about them — "Look at Norway", "Every tenth man had to die", "Greet my loved ones and thank them for everything", "This time we shall bring freedom home". You read them under your feet as you climb, and at the top there is only the horizon they sailed towards.

For Alexander Lervik the project was personal. His grandfather went to sea during the Second World War, and the stories he grew up with are the ones the monument was built to keep. Fifteen years passed between the first sketch and the finished work.

The monument is not finished until it is experienced the way it was imagined. Lervik has said that he wants to return during a storm and stand in the bow — as close as one can come today to what the war sailors stood in front of.

Placed 20 June 2024 and officially inaugurated on 6 July 2024 during Skudefestivalen. Commissioned by Stiftelsen Krigsseilermonumentet på Haugalandet, produced by Marine Aluminium, and realised with the support of Solstad Rederi, Karmøy Municipality, Rogaland County Council, Haugesund Rederiforening, Knutsen OAS, Den Norske Krigsforsikring for Skip, Norges Rederiforbund and others.