Gavin Atkin's weblog for the sort of people who like looking inside boat sheds. It's about old boats, traditional boats, boat building, restoration, the sea and the North Kent Coast
Adam Newton of the Boatyard at Beer tells me that elegant new rowing boat he’s been working on is now complete and has been sold to a happy customer from Plymouth.
I gather the new owner plans to take her to the Beale Park Boat Show next year to demonstrate some adjustable rowlocks he’s designing. Now that sounds interesting…
It’s likely an illusion, but it seems that there’s always seems to be someone having more fun than I am. A day or two ago it was that Chris Partridge going rowing when he should have been working, and today, as I munch my calorie-controlled lunch, its the Scottish Coastal Rowing types at Portobello launching their community built St Ayles skiffs into as much surf as they dare.
Do take a look at their gallery for some more superb shots.
Now I’d better break off to get back to half-heartedly chewing my microwaved carrots.
This is what happened when the round boat built at the Boat Building Academy for artists JocJonJosch was launched in London some days ago, with JocJonJosh at the oars.
The boat is the centrepiece of a project called Worstward Ho, which the artists explain like this:
Worstward Ho! is a project under construction and is part of JocJonJosch’s series of Investigations into Collaboration.
Worstward Ho! takes the form of a round boat with three oars, symbolic of the collective’s dynamic, in which Joschi, Jonathan and Joc wrestle towards a destination. There is a sense that each time one member attempts to move forward his movement and the direction in which he would like to travel is countered by the action of the other two. It is an exhausting exercise and the collaborators often feel as if they are going nowhere, that they are turning in circles.
The boat is a useable sculpture, that is to say it is a boat built to be rowed on water. It’s significance however, is not in any specific journey that we take or plan to take in the boat but instead in the ambiguous and challenging journey that it suggests.
‘My heavens!’ as my granny would have said.
I can’t help feeling this thing is a kind of monument to the frustrations of working as part of a collaboration. I’m also reminded of coracles, which definitely go where the pilot intends, and, of course, the round Vietnamese fishing boat that my brother Matthew Atkin photographed a little while ago, and which Pete Williamson also captured.
By the way, connoisseurs of these things might be interested to see JocJonJosh’s portfolio and Facebook page. But it’s back to boats for this weblog…