Artist's work left on ship with fool I fired (9)
I believe the answer is:
portfolio
'artist's work' is the definition.
The definition and answer can be both man-made objects as well as being singular nouns.
Maybe you can see a link between them that I can't see?
'left on ship with fool i fired' is the wordplay.
I cannot quite understand how this works, but
'left' could be 'port' (left side of a ship - opposite of starboard) and 'port' is found within the answer.
'i' is found in the answer.
an anagram of 'fool' is 'folo' which is located in the remaining letters.
No letters remain.
This may be the basis of the clue (or it may be nonsense).
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for portfolio that I've seen before include "Case for loose paper, drawings etc" , "Set of investments held by one person" , "governmental responsibility" , "Set of collected pieces of creative work" , "Set of papers" .)