New excuse to go sailing

Lia Ditton explains how her singlehanded ocean racing can be considered 'art'

"Art is what you can get away with" - pushing the limits of this Andy Warhol maxim, is 25 year old Aurelia Ditton - profession: art, medium: sailing.

Ditton has acquired Ralph Marx's 34ft trimaran Shockwave and having repaired the boat following a capsize has it entered in the Royal Western Yacht Club's singlehanded transatlantic race at the end of May. While 'young lass aboard potentially race winning trimaran crossing the Atlantic upwind singlehanded' is remarkable in itself, the OSTAR is in fact just the opening overture of a unique sailing program that will form the final year of Ditton's Sculpture degree at London's Chelsea College of Art.

Ditton spent her childhood sailing with her parents on a 19 footer on the east coast, venturing further afield down through the French canals to the Mediterranean. However she says she didn't get the taste for offshore sailing until she was mid-way through her degree.

"I did my first and second year at Chelsea College of Art four years ago and then you could write your own program for a term. So I sent myself to India to carve stone and then I ended up sailing home," she says. The passage back to Europe on a classic schooner took seven months. "Obviously I was a bit late for the next year," she continues. "But it was like ‘sailing just rocks! This is what I want to do!' And I went off and did that."

After losing interest in a job working in Baltimore doing museum restoration Ditton headed for the Caribbean and bummed around on boats before realising she could earn a living from working on them. From here she began racing in the Caribbean ultimately ending up in Newport, Rhode Island crewing on board the TP52 Rosebud.

However completing her degree was still on her mind. "It was nagging me that that was something I wanted to finish and if I could do both [sailing and sculpture] that would be my perfect world," she says. "So last year I went back to the University and said 'this is what I want to do - I want to sail across the Atlantic and make it art'. And they said ‘this is crazy and fantastic - welcome back’. Which they don’t really do very much. That college takes 24 people from between 400-900 applicants a year, so it is quite a privilege to be able to go back there."

In Antigua Ditton encountered the great patron of female short handed ocean racing, Andrew Pindar who acquired Derek Hatfield's Open 40 Spirit of Canada initially for Ditton to use. The scheme she's sold to Pindar was to race the boat across the Atlantic writing a diary on the inside of the hull as she went. Once she's arrived in the US, the hull would be cut in half so the diary could be read, with one half hull staying in the US, the other being shipped back the UK.

"I’d sold it to a museum in New York and the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, which was fine but I couldn’t get the money to buy the boat in the first place," says Ditton. "I was trying to sell this idea to people and they couldn’t understand why you’d cut the boat in half just to read it - it was a destructive investment..."

Instead the idea evolved. While the Open 40 was sold to a new owner Ditton sought another boat ultimately ending up with her present trimaran. The trimaran she says made sense as she had carried out the refit of Phil Weld's 1980 OSTAR winning trimaran, Moxie and sailed her across the Atlantic with the new owner. "All my experience that shouted towards the OSTAR was multihulls so when I was trying to sell an Open 40 to people that wasn’t happening".

Also rather than write a diary and then chainsaw the boat in two her idea developed into one slightly less aggressive using paint. Ditton approached Blakes Hempel about them developing new paints she could use for her project, in the process giving the company new ideas for products they could develop commercially. First up of these is effectively a 'gob-stopper' paint system.

Once Shockwave returns from the OSTAR she will be painted with a five coat system including UV coating and lacquer, the top coat being satin black. The paint is such that whenever waves pass down the hull or it rains, it will streak revealing and mixing the different layers of paint beneath. "Uncontrollable paint - mindbogglingly wonderful!" enthuses Ditton, comparing it to the T-shirts popular in the 1980s which would change colour when you sweated.

Once painted gob-stopper Shockwave will be delivered to London where she will be exhibited from the end of August in the huge courtyard outside Chelsea College at its new base next door to the Tate Modern on London's South Bank. By coincidence the display of the boat will coincide with the Turner Prize being held at the Tate Modern next door.

For Blakes Hempel there are more useful applications. Ditton gives the example of a similar type of paint system that is heat sensitive and could be applied to an engine. "You could paint the engine black and when it is hot it will go orange and when it is overheating it can go yellow..."



Ditton hopes that the media attention from this will help her raise funds to compete in the 5 Oceans singlehanded round the world race with stops. This of course will be the vehicle for another sculpture project involving paint. "I am thinking about an Open 50 with a customised inside so the nav station is pushed to one side and you have got carbon fibre gimballed paint pots…" she says. This will require further work with Blakes Hempel. "We are developing a paint that dries instantly. You throw it down and it dries just like that. But it can also be removed with thinners which don’t interfere with the undercoat ie the white, so it can be removed at the next port. Nobody will know until when I get into port quite what the boat is going to look like. " Her Open 50 will effectively become her reusable canvas.

"I had a lot of critics among my friends, saying you’re not going to have time to paint the boat, you’re supposed to be a professional yacht racer and I was going ‘no, if I climb the mast I’ll take a pot with me. If I get stuck in the Doldrums I can dribble streaks down the side of the hull. That should be quite fun."

Again there are more practical applications for this quick drying paint. "If you wanted to charter a race boat and you wanted to dress it is your own colours you could paint it on Friday and wash it off the following weekend," says Ditton.

And her creativity doesn't end there..."The third idea involves making music using refracted light prisms through the mainsail..."

In the short term Ditton has personally completed the refit of Shockwave using her own skills, including a fair amount of laminating, and virtually no money - she is of course looking for sponsorship and needs £25,000 to get the boat finished fully for the OSTAR.

Currently Ditton is off on her singlehanded qualifier for the OSTAR. On her return she has been asked to compete in a French feeder race to Plymouth for the OSTAR start, but expects to spend some time in Plymouth getting to grips with the boat perhaps sailing against her sistership Meridian.

Offers of sponsorship or bids on Lia's sculpture can be sent here.

More photos on the following pages...