Ghost on the boards

Ghost on the Boards is a large-scale meditation on speed, mortality, and mechanical obsession. Measuring 79 x 63 inches, the work transforms an early photograph of a 1914 Cyclone board track racer, ridden by J.A. “Jack” McNeil, into a monumental field of hand-set brass studs on leather.

Built through many painstaking hours of repeated impact, the piece carries the physical endurance of its making. Each brass stud is individually placed and set by hand, forming an image that only fully resolves with distance. Up close, the rider and machine dissolve into metal, leather, rhythm, and shadow. From further back, the ghostly figure emerges — hunched low over the machine, suspended in a moment of speed that feels both heroic and haunted.

The subject belongs to the dangerous era of board track racing, when riders pushed rigid-framed motorcycles around wooden motordromes at speeds that could exceed 100 mph. These tracks, constructed from timber planks, were brutal arenas of risk. Splintered surfaces, minimal protection, mechanical failure, and high-speed crashes made the sport deadly for riders and spectators alike. Though McNeil survived his racing career, the image still carries the atmosphere of a discipline defined by danger, spectacle, and the constant nearness of death.

The brass studs give the work a warmer, more historical charge than chrome. Their aged metallic tone feels connected to early machinery, oil, dust, heat, and tarnished trophies. Against the dark leather ground, they flicker like traces of a half-remembered photograph — part racing archive, part memorial, part apparition.

As with the wider collection, Ghost on the Boards sits between image and object. Leather becomes track, metal becomes motion, and the labor of the hand becomes a form of devotion. The work is not simply a portrait of a rider, but a relic of velocity — a tribute to the men, machines, and dangerous wooden circuits that burned brightly before disappearing into history.