RSS Feed
Flotilla
TEXT AND PHOTOS BY TOM LOESER
This series of “bad boats,” formally know as “Flotilla,” came out of a summer project in the woodshop at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 2006. Two graduate students (Matthias Pliessnig and Ben Wooten) and I built three copies of a real boat, the Whitehall 12, using a building system developed by Platt Montfort in Maine. Montfort called his boats Geodesic Airolite boats, and there is a terrific website, www.gaboats.com, which shows the Whitehall and many other of his designs. Unfortunately, he died a couple of years ago, but his wife still runs the company.
The basic concept of Montfort’s system is to build a very lightweight frame using traditional techniques (steambent oak ribs and straight-grain fir or cedar stringers running the length of the boat). The resulting frame is a bit flexible, and it is stiffened with diagonal bracing of Kevlar thread that triangulates everything. The skin is aircraft Dacron that is formulated to heat-shrink. After you attach it to the gunwale of the boat, you iron the skin with a household iron and it tightens up like a drumhead. The boats are semi-transparent and ultra-light. Extremely nice to row, and fast. The skin needs some extra care. Montfort suggests carrying a roll of duct tape whenever you go out.
“Right” (2008)
White oak, Sitka spruce, birch plywood
6″ × 48″ × 17″
 |
 |
 |
1.“Swim” (2008)
White oak, Sitka spruce, birch plywood
6″ × 60″ × 18″
2, 3.“Left” [and detail] (2008)
White oak, Sitka spruce, birch plywood
6″ × 39″ × 39″
Perhaps what is most important here is that I learned a bit about how boats are lofted and built using a system of stations that define key cross-sections. These stations are then joined and blended into a 3-dimensional form using the lengthwise stringers. It is a very different way to generate 3-dimensional form from most furnituremaking techniques, and it is a wonderful way to develop compound forms where everything is curved in more than one direction. (Matthias Pliessnig went on to use the technique to generate his latest batch of furniture forms.)
While the three of us were building the boats we talked about messing with the symmetrical nature of boats and making a boat that would just go in a circle. This year I decided to explore the boat idea further, but to make them as conceptual models instead of as real full-size boats. So, these seven pieces are “proposals” for boats you would never want to build. Some of them suggest alternative means of locomotion through the water. Instead of generating motion by applying external force from a motor or a sail or an oar, what if a boat could swim, or screw its way through the water? Although these are nonfunctional sculptural forms, they are still looking at issues of function, or perhaps more accurately at dysfunction. Like much of my furniture work, they get their meaning from subverting or inverting functional ideas.
4. “Screw” (2008)
White oak, Sitka spruce, birch plywood
18″ × 61″ × 18″
5. “Over” (2008)
White oak, Sitka spruce, birch plywood
16″ × 50″ × 16″
6. “Drop” (2008)
White oak, Sitka spruce, birch plywood
19″ × 37″ × 17″
7, 8. “Eddy” [and detail] (2008)
White oak, Sitka spruce, birch plywood
32″ × 32″ × 17″
The forms are all generated by using the same set of seven stations, (really five stations plus the stem and the transom, which define the two ends of the form), and then organizing the stations on differently-shaped “platforms” (the boatbuilding term is “strongback”) to generate the new form. For “Eddy,” the stations are attached to the external perimeter of a disk. For “Screw,” the stations are attached at various points around a straight but faceted post. Mostly the parts are steambent, but some more extreme forms like the keel on “Screw” are both laminated and steambent.
I envision showing the boats together with each suspended by monofilament line 36″ off the ground to suggest a common water level for all of them. Viewers would feel as though they are walking waist deep in the water.
An exhibition of these boats ran at Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mobilia Gallery is located at 358 Huron Avenue, Cambridge; (617) 876-2109; www.mobilia-gallery.com. It’s open Tuesday–Saturday.