F. Eight Houses of
In 2015, starting with the production of eight bases cut from a piece of salvaged timber, I decided I would make some works that were more overtly architectural than the sets of models I had been making post 2007. Inventing and rejecting a few alternative ideas, I settled on a collection of refurbished titles which had antecedents over a decade old, and which had variously been called either temples or chambers. They now manifested under the rubric of ‘House of …’ as it seemed a term of greater ambiguity and flexibility. As previously, and subsequently, the entertainment of generating titles results in excess.
Ruminations about titles draws attention to the reality that the title provides a broad brief for the work. Having decided to build something with a given title, in each instance I needed some concept of what one might be if I was to make a model at least loosely deriving from it. This was more-or-less a return to the strategies I employed in the Prelude set of pavilions.
The architectural input varied from exploring a period of architecture – for example Arts and Crafts – to quotes from particular buildings, to deriving characteristics from one building or type. Mostly the title preceded any form-giving, but there were also instances of formal ideas in search of a title or evolving and refining together.
35 Museum of Allusive Implications
This is as much a house as its predecessors but, since it centres on a curation of elements, materials, and remnants of my former models, the term ‘Museum’ has been enlisted. It started with several cast-off elements that I liked and had retained. These were looking for a home, and some were amongst the chosen. The first was, loosely, a serrated ovaloid shape. The serrations came about by drilling a series of holes to run a saw through when cutting out the shape in the roof of the ‘House of Ornate Temptations’. The timber thus shaped was kept and, for my purposes here, mounted on a plinth.
Another remnant came from sawing off the end of the vaguely Unité d’Habitation section of the ‘House of Lost Concepts’. Again, this resides on a plinth. The copper tube gathering the roof supports is also a left over. Beyond this begin self-quotations and continuations: the large object in the middle is made from the same wood as the wing form in the last of the Bagatelles; the roof supports are similar to those supporting the cello shape in the Music Bridge; the base of varying timbers, is an irregular version of the platform in the first Epistemological Pavilion; the outline shape of the roof echoes many shapes used throughout the series; the aluminium tubes are an extension of those in the Music Jetty – flat-topped there, but describing a slightly complex curve in this museum.
The origins of the two frames are more involved. The square timber one alludes to the six-metre square, slowly moving, frames by Paris-based architecture and design studio ciguë, produced for the moving first part of the ballet triptych ‘Woolf Works’, choreographed by Wayne McGregor for the Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, 2015. (Not seen by us until July 2017). The positioning of it on a track in this model alludes to the track for the red frame in the first pavilion. Red frames and red doors have appeared in other models, hence the need for one more.
Base: 127mm x 102mm. Model: 127mm x 102mm. Height: 103mm.
Initiated: January 2018. Constructed: 31 January 2018 – 22 March 2018.