Seascape Escape

The earliest major piece in the exhibition - a sea-going boat - actually no longer exists. It had a short and heroic life. Its presence is eloquently replaced by a model of it, with crew, in a bottle sited in comic solemnity on a copy of Robinson Crusoe.

I'd always made ships in bottles. Activities where it wasn't like Art with a capital A.

The boat was made in Dobrowolski's first year as a fine art student at Hull. He made it as a way of escaping from art school. Though clearly a personal invention (not based on any professional blue-print) the boat, made from drift-wood, was built to survive the anticipated physical realities of a real journey at sea. The constructional and mechanical skills he demonstrates in all his work he has taught himself through trial and error. He remembers the importance of graduating, in his go-kart days, from nails to screws. It is important to him that his skills are within the competence of everyone who wants to bother. However, while the construction methods are 'purely functional' the boat as a whole surely alludes, with some irony, to a tradition of improvised fairytale boats. 'The owl and the pussycat put to sea...' The photograph of it on its maiden, and only, voyage shows the three-man crew of art students in naval hats. Benny Hill salutes must have been irresistible.

The act of escaping, however symbolic, was as important to the work as the boat itself which was the means to that end. I asked if the boat was, in effect, an element in a performance piece.

I not only wanted to escape from art college. I was trying, and failing, to escape from being pigeon-holed as a painter or a sculptor or a performance artist. There wasn't much organisation about the event; we just went when the tide was right. Time and tide they wait for no man and they don't wait for performance artists either.

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The art college was right on the banks of the Humber. It was built on a filled-in dock. In the book Robinson Crusoe, he leaves from Hull and the Council, or Tourist Information, had decided to build a monument saying that he left from this public garden where our college was. To all intents and purposes Robinson Crusoe left from my art college. What was nice about it was that I didn't know that. There I was one day trying to escape from art college, building a boat out of drift wood I'd found on the River Humber and, walking home one day, I walked past this monument to Robinson Crusoe. I thought, that's a nice coincidence really. So the boat got called Friday.
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I made it to escape in but it took so long to make that the end of term had come and everyone had gone home for the summer. I ended up staying behind to finish building the boat. The idea was to escape in it but it ended up keeping me there longer. When I launched it the caretaker and technicians were the only ones there to help me. The launch was cancelled a couple of times because it was too rough. When we did go it was all a bit of a panic. The Pilot Launch was going to follow us but the day we went I didn't realise that the Launch didn't have the same people on it that I'd made the agreement with. So, when we got in the water and went down stream the Pilot Launch just waved us off and went in the opposite direction. I also didn't know that I'd actually picked the worst day that I could have done. It was a Spring tide. At the start the tide was coming in really fast but it took so long to set up the mast on the boat that when we got the thing in the water the tide was going out. We needed the tide coming in to cross it safely. As it was the three of us - me, Eddie and Paul - just went down stream.

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We couldn't steer or anything 'cos there was no wind. We got nicely into the shipping lane. I had a tape recorder in the bottom of the boat. I thought of it as a black box flight recorder. Also I had a really cheap home-movie camera with a tiny view-finder. On the tape you can hear this stirrup pump. It was like the ones that the air raid wardens used in Dad's Army. I was using it as a bilge pump. There's a lot of panic when a big wave picks us up and drops us. But then an air of calm comes over us 'cos we think that if we can get through that we can get through anything. And then you hear somebody say, 'We're going to hit that buoy!' So I get the cine-camera out to film the buoy - and that's when I realise how fast we're going. I'm looking through this tiny view-finder and I can see this buoy getting bigger - really quickly... And then there's a commotion on the tape as we hit it very hard, and swing round... At this point a tug boat saw us and came out to rescue us.

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Through the whole making of the boat there was - not a sense of doom - but, like, an impending sense of something important happening... There was a lot of walking down to the river and looking out across the water and trying to imagine my boat on it. And then you'd go there another windy day and see big waves and think, 'Oh, a bigger boat... A lot of suspense was built up so when we collided with the buoy, just got rescued and got off there was this real sense of anti-climax. We were on the tug and they were pulling my boat moored along side. Now, the thing is, as the boat's going up stream the wash from the tug is, sort of, like, forcing water into my boat. Plus we were also moored along-side the outlet for their bilge pump so they were pumping water straight in. We're looking over the side of the tug into it and I'm thinking, 'It's gonna sink.' The tape recorder was in there and this Dad's Army pump and this bell which was quite important 'cos we'd borrowed it from Eddie's mum. It was her door bell so we had to get it back. I panicked slightly and said, 'Look, I'm gonna have to go back in and salvage these important items. You know there's that thing in Hollywood movies where somebody goes back into the burning house - or the sinking ship - to create a bit of suspense. It was a bit like that. I got back in the boat and, in a panic situation, all your fingers turn to thumbs don't they? I couldn't undo this bell. I got the tape recorder and picked up the pump but I'd wound the hose around this eyelet thing and it was in a big knot. I thought, 'Well, rather than undo it all I'd just break the hose off.' I handed the pump to a friend on the tug, put my foot against the side, and said, 'Hold it tight. I'm gonna pull the hose off!' Now, amazingly, at this point what I hadn't realised was that the rope that was tying us to the tug had snapped. So when I did break the hose it was the only thing holding me to the side of the tug. And then I look up and I see those big rubber tyres that they have on the side of ships were going past me. Then I realise what's happened. I reach out - but the tug was inches away from my finger-tips and then it was gone... It was going up stream and I was going down stream - and sinking. I managed to find a bucket and kept the water out long enough for the tug to come right round and pull me off. As I got off, my boat just wobbled, turned over and we watched it disappear down stream. It was just like a corny movie but of course it was all horribly real.