HOUSE was part of the 10-day project Any Questions? on the island of Mandø, off the west coast of Denmark, in 2010.

I drew with aluminum poles to construct a life-size house in three-dimensions.  What did this house offer? Neither shelter nor privacy, warmth or security, safe storage, permanence, or stability. It was a blending of inside and outside, using only the most minimal lines to define its space within the greater expanse of the landscape. For the final 4 days, I built the structure on mud flads surrounding the island, and the tide flooded in, mixing sea and house.

The sculpture expands an idea of home to include the outdoor environment, but I wasn’t only interested in blending interior and exterior spaces in a physical sense.  I was also thinking about the work on a psychological level, with the house as a symbol of the self, and what it might mean to dissolve traditional barriers between one’s sense of self and the rest of the world.  As Bachelard wrote in the Poetics of Space, “there is ground for taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul.”   

When seen as an image, the house is flattened through the process of photography, and the photos present the structure as a series of two-dimensional drawings which generate an ambiguous sense of space and scale. The images document a continually changing landscape as the sea enters through doors and walls, with no roof to keep out the weather.