The painting’s woven surface suggests both fabric and the tides. Here two well-dressed figures stage an animated debate before a model boat; on the wall nearby, another face glances out towards the Venice lagoon – the protagonist of Himid’s Man in a Rope Drawer. Ropes are indispensable to boatbuilding, binding hull to mast; their knots perfected over time, a craft passed on from generation to generation. The warp and weft of the painted textile in Boatbuilders hints at movement across the water, the turbulence of the sea without guaranteed arrival. As Himid has said, those who come from elsewhere are continually negotiating belonging: deciding whether to integrate by learning the language and behaviours of the new place, or to live with the friction that difference produces.