When a boat becomes a gallery

The 2026 BOAT Artistry and Craft Awards were recently announced. These are the awards for the big boats, boats that I, along with many others, can only dream of stepping foot on.

When we first bought our Jeanneau Sunkiss 49, there was only one piece of art on the boat, a wall photo from a Clear Communications yacht race. They sponsored the New Zealand Endeavour in the Whitbread Around the World Yacht Race. The photo departed our boat soon afterwards as we attempted to make it our own. When you get to a boat our size, you're focused on the practical side of living on the water. Space is gold. Everything comes down to purpose. Does it have a purpose? If not, it's gone.

So where does art sit in boating? I once toured New Zealand with Don Norman, who wrote the fantastic book The Design of Everyday Things. He presented the humble lemon squeezer as an example. The one he showed wasn't expensive but was designed to look like the alien ships from War of the Worlds. Because it wasn't designed in the normal way, there was an element of playfulness. It was enough to make you think: where does art start and where does functionality end? Can they overlap with purpose? That War of the Worlds lemon squeezer is something everyone at those talks will remember. Functional, but with form. Function with playfulness in mind.

I thought about that reading the results of this year's BOAT Artistry and Craft Awards. Beyond that element of form with function is the notion that the best objects don't resist time, they absorb it. They wear their history. A well-used wooden handle tells you something a plastic one never will. The traditional timbers on a classic yacht tell a million stories that younger boats with their use of plywood won't have a hope of giving us.

I surmise it was this element that inspired Eva Mechler as she designed her sinks for the 50-metre superyacht ALY501. Who would think sinks could be a work of art? Form and function come together here. Mechler carved hers from smoked sweet chestnut, hand-shaped, finished with plant oils. In a marine environment, wood is the hard choice. It moves with humidity, responds to salt air. Mechler chose it anyway, because no synthetic surface ages like timber. In ten years, those sinks will look like they belong on that boat in a way stainless steel or composite never quite manages.

Alexandra Llewellyn built a trilogy of game boards for the Feadship Valor. The centrepiece is a circular backgammon set. The format has been square for millennia. Llewellyn made it round, 24 points for 24 hours, 12 divisions echoing the zodiac, constellation paths traced in silver wire and mother-of-pearl across figured timber, a continuous hand-drawn water motif worked through marquetry and shifting grain directions. it makes you think. Playfulness at work. There's also a marine tournament board called Eat or Be Eaten, and an oversized solitaire in ancient bog oak with sharks and rays across the surface. Every piece weighted and balanced for play at sea.

Zena Holloway spent 30 years as an underwater photographer watching marine ecosystems decline before deciding a camera wasn't enough. Her wall lights for the 44.3-metre explorer yacht Nasiba are bio-fabricated from willow roots and mycelium, materials she first noticed threading through a riverbank during a clean-up. They were alive before they became objects.

And then there's Yoshinori Nagashima, Judges' Commendation, a cutlery set commissioned through Winch Design. Six hundred individual pieces. Fourteen new designs. Each one hand-forged from stainless steel, prototyped, held, assessed for how it felt before the next one was made. A work of art and love and permanence, sitting in a drawer on a superyacht.

Could you put any of this into a 15-metre Jeanneau? On a smaller boat, you'd have to pick and choose. But the reality is there's always room for a little art, a little playfulness, a little whimsy. Unless you're counting your weight, then that's another story altogether.

Check out the full BOAT International article.