Over a thousand objects in one boat

Contrary to what you might expect, this is not a boat that holds a lot of objects, but a yacht built from over 1200 wooden objects, each with its own story and emotional charge. It's a story linked to the 2012 Olympics and this functional yacht was the brainchild of artists keen to build links between people, between the sailing history of the South East England community and Olympic yacht racing.

The yacht is in fact a work of art and its curators are Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters, two young English artists, members of the company Lone Twin. The idea to build the craft started in 2000, when they were in Norway with another art project. This project aimed to get people to cross bridges to bring them together. There was even a walk back and forth across a bridge with the locals, where they talked about the crossing, the water, the boats and how they can bring people together.

Out of these discussions came the idea of building a boat that would connect people with something. For a few years the project sat there, somewhere in the back of my mind, waiting for the right moment. That came in 2009, when the two artists applied for funding from the Cultural Olympiad program, a cultural program that accompanied the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games in the UK. They were accepted and the adventure began.

The project was to collect wooden objects of special significance and use them to build a yacht to be launched in May 2012. It would sail along the English coast for 3 months. Also, the story of each object would be written down and all these stories would make up a book to be launched with the yacht.

In 2011, from February to August, Welan and Winters traveled all over south-east England, inviting people to donate wooden objects with special meaning. They managed to collect over 1200 different and special objects, from a splinter from a Jimi Hendrix guitar to parts of famous old ships.

There were hangers, toys, toy trains, guitars and other musical instruments, tools. One of the most prized was a mast from an old boat that sailed on the Thames. From it 5 circles, the Olympic circles, were cut out and mounted on the cabin door.

A designer and 4 professional builders were hired to build the yacht, led by Mark Covell, a skilled sailor and former Olympic silver medalist. They worked for 8 months, during which time all the assembled objects were cut, machined, sanded, sanded and glued together to make a boat. That's what happened and the 10 m long yacht was launched on May 7, 2012 in Chichester. Between May 18 and August 11, it sailed along the coast from Hayling Island to Weymouth, the site of the Olympic yachting races.

Gregg and Gary's project succeeded in uniting a community with strong ties to boating and sailing in a place with a long history of boat building. By donating those memorabilia, it created an excitement of participating in such a project and the idea that they will never fade away, forever trapped in a symbol of the Olympics.

(source: theguardian.com)