Skip to content
About the Piece
Castaway
Dylan Gauthier
Brewster, Massachusetts and Brooklyn, New York
2022, recycled salvaged cardboard, fallen pitch pine, oak, Tyvek, boat parts
Constructed of cardboard salvaged from this museum’s daily operations, wood glue, and remilled wood from recently fallen trees, this sculpture references the catboat, an iconic New England leisure craft. First used for fishing, the catboat can trace its lines to boatbuilding workshops that constructed early whaling ships and workboats and then turned their attention to leisure boats with the rise of the middle-class in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Inspiration & Process
Gauthier was moved by stories of the region’s near total depletion of once-lush native forests fueled by colonization and the rise of maritime industries from the 17th – 20th centuries. Today, remnants of those maritime industries can be found in the derelict boats that one often encounters throughout the Cape. Gauthier takes the much-loved catboat’s shape and history and by constructing it out of cardboard, connects that history with our use of forest-based products today.
In his work, conceptual artist Dylan Gauthier makes extensive use of found and cast-off materials including cardboard, plastic, salvaged wood, and paper. As a founder of the artist/boatbuilding collective Mare Liberum, he has built full-scale usable boats from bamboo and museum signage, kraft paper and wood glue, and repurposed plywood, and staged public voyages, performances, and on-water excursions that connect communities with their local waterways as part of an environmental art practice.
In an artistic tradition that reflects arte povera – the Italian art movement that explored unconventional processes and materials – the Duchampian “readymade,” and 1960s and 70s Land Art (a proto-environmental art movement), Gauthier’s work addresses ecological and environmental issues through a poetic and evocative fusing of form and content that questions our relationship to common materials. His work often draws connections between waste, leisure, tourism, and “convenience culture” that seem inseparable from contemporary life and mass consumerism.
Map representing approximate areas of “virgin forest” across the U.S. at the time of early European colonization (archival/wikimedia commons).
Dylan Gauthier leading a “toxic tour” of the Newtown Creek superfund site in hand-built boats made from recycled plywood.
