PROVINCETOWN — In September 1620, an ambitious group of people boarded a ship called the Mayflower in England in search of something better. The journey across the Atlantic was a rough 66 days filled with choppy waters, treacherous storms and bouts of sea-sickness. Finally, they spotted land, rounded a tip and anchored into Provincetown harbor.

The 400th anniversary of this remarkable event calls for celebration. One sculptor in particular is doing more than just creating a piece of work commemorating the event — she decided to relive the journey.

Rachel Carter, from Nottingham, England, was commissioned by Mayflower 400, a British nonprofit, to create a sculpture called “The Pilgrim Women.” She wanted to create something that was historically accurate and wanted to understand fully what the Pilgrims experienced.

“I wanted to think about how I could experience that as an artist,” Carter said. “So I thought, well the separatists and the Pilgrims, they were trapped on board a ship, completely cut off from the outside world. The people they left behind would not know where they were. It’s so alien to today where we’re so connected all the time.”

Carter decided to travel across the Atlantic Ocean aboard a freight ship.

On July 27, she drove up to Liverpool, England, boarded a ship and began her journey. There were only 10 passengers, any more and the boat would legally need a doctor, she said. She ate the same meals as the sailors (although as a vegan, she was limited to mostly cabbage and potatoes). She walked the main areas of the ship and read an account by William Bradford, a separatist who described his voyage on the Mayflower and settling into the Plimoth Plantation.

“I was trying to read that in real time so I was experiencing both what I was feeling on the ship and what they (were) feeling on the ship. It was interesting to do that simultaneously,” Carter said.

The trip took eight days, via Scotland and down to Halifax. From Halifax, she took a flight to Boston, where she researched art works from the Wampanoag and the Iroquois. Before setting sail on this journey, Carter, who specializes in creating bronze sculptures through textures such as weaving, crochet and knitting, did research on her own ancestry and found 400 years of lace weavers in her family. While studying the techniques of indigenous weaving, she found they had a bit in common.

“I saw some similarities between the geometric forms of flora and fauna of the indigenous population,” Carter said. “Two peoples separated by a huge ocean; my ancestors all of whom were illiterate but was very accomplished weavers. And the same with the first nations; they didn’t write down their histories; they wove them.”

Carter arrived in Provincetown in Aug. 11 at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum to teach visitors how to weave as well as tell them about her journey to the United States. More than 350 people have learned how to weave their own bracelets or key chains as Carter explains her background and her goal for “The Pilgrim Women.”

After her residency in Provincetown is complete on Aug. 25, she will return home and begin her ultimate project to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing.

“The Pilgrim Women” will be a sculpture of a woman in a historically accurate Tudor gown covered with flora and fauna that Carter will weave. Thanks to 3-D printing, she can keep her original weavings and send a 3-D copy of her work to the foundry, which will be melted and covered in bronze.

Carter will don a real Tudor dress made by a group of women in Gainsborough, England, and will pose in a photogrammetry booth that will scan her from head to toe with 150 different cameras. It will pick up on every single stitch and will create the base of her sculpture.

She will finish her sculpture by September 2020, just in time for the official 400th anniversary. It will be displayed somewhere in England along the Pilgrims’ trail; the exact location still to be determined.

Carter has been a professional artist for 12 years and has made more than 100 sculptures.

Carter always liked to make things, and when she tried to join a metalwork class at school, her teacher said it wasn’t for girls. He thought it would be unfair to the boys because he would have to spend the entire class teaching her. Instead, she was pushed into catering, where she got a job.

“After seven years in catering, I had one of those mornings where you have that sudden realization, and I just thought, this isn’t really what I want to do with my life. I was good at my job; I enjoyed it to a degree, but I wasn’t passionate about it,” Carter said.

That’s when she decided to sign up for an art class at her local college. The class rekindled her passion for creating things. After that, she took more classes and became a full-time art student as a married 27-year-old with two kids, a dog and a house, she said.

Her degree allowed her to experiment with a wide range of materials, from wood to clay to different metal work. She specialized in woodwork and metalwork and has been working on different projects ever since.

Carter has created sculptures that had been deemed impossible to make, she said.

“When people see a sculpture, they don’t often realize the amount of work that’s gone into it. They think you just have the idea in your head and you make it,” Carter said. “I wanted to be able to show people, both in Nottingham and here ... all the stuff that goes into it — the background and the research and the developments and the experiments and the failures and the successes.”