A. Epistemological Pavilions – Etude Series
Etudes, at least for composers, are studies or exercises intended to provide a pupil with a range of possibilities for practice while being, at the same time, a worthwhile composition. Many composers have produced etudes where they have probably concentrated on the second purpose. Chopin’s etudes where the inspirastion for this series. Each model was commenced prior to me having any clarity about what I was making, and with only a limited idea about how I would make it; I engaged in making and through this generated ideas to direct further making. Titles came during this process as I began to gain confidence about a work. Some models had their titles refined near or at the end of making. Titles were intended to be evocatively descriptive.
4 An Ideal of House
Is this an Heideggerian dwelling? There is a clearing in the forest. Here it has become a raft floating in a recession in the polished timber base that forms the (primal) forest. The edge demarks the limit of human domination over a small piece carved from the formerly unknown wild forest. Our dominion over parcels of knowledge won from the extensive realm of the not known is paralleled here. In the view of Chaos Theory ‘the edge of chaos’ between the orderly and the genuinely random is the boundary at which life and creativity reside. It is here that information is produced.
Things ordered by humans are subject to entropy. The fence has bent and sunk. It echoes, for me, previously purposeful fences on farms or those on coastal beaches that once retained primary dunes but are now derelict.
The elements of house are present, but abstracted, extracted, for scrutiny: four walls, two doors, one door frame, a roof, a hearth minimally composed in turn of fireplace and seat, a fence, a path. Axes order the whole.
In prior models the framing device is conceived as a mechanism for looking out of or through – the viewer surveys the knowledge landscape. Here, perhaps because it is clearly a doorframe, the issue of looking in (or better, going in) is raised. Knowledge has been historically portrayed as a rite of passage, an entering into a condition. Entry to domains of professional knowledge (and then the ability to utilise such knowledge) has long been guarded by various gatekeepers. Knowledge domains are fenced off in various ways, the portals guarded by gatekeepers and mechanisms to ensure only initiates enter. But, like farm fences and those edging the sand dunes along the coast, the fences that patrol domains fall slowly into disrepair. They teeter, tilt and finally fall. As their power to separate wanes, ideas sneak across the boundaries in each direction; some escape, others clamber in and roost.
Could this be a first house? Not the celebrated and imaginary first ever house, the primitive hut in paradise, but the first house of an individual – the familiar first and ideal house from which to initially explore the comparative safety of the clearing before venturing away along the forest path to the unknown and possibly unsafe world beyond. That is if the unsafe world is not already within or a constant electronic presence.
Could this be a last house? Is it a tomb that is, like all past things, decaying?
The principle influences are a lifetime’s worth of small buildings, sheds, houses and pavilions. What was initially and specifically in mind were various aging farm buildings north of Melbourne with brick chimneys. These became coupled with a farm fence from long ago lurking somewhere in my slide collection and many other old fences, particularly those along ocean beaches. European thatch huts and Shinto shrines rounded out the family of physical influences.
Ideas of place and hearth and pulling apart to analyse relations contributed, but the strongest of these ideas was drawn from the writings of Martin Heidegger and various versions of ‘Adam’s Hut in Paradise’. Certainly all sorts of human constructions against wild nature were influential themes. There were intimations of deconstruction, or at least a drawing-apart of the elements of a construction.
Base: 212mm x 159mm. Height: 92mm.
Initiated: March 1998. Constructed: March – December 1998.