Pavilion No.7

I found some cardboard on my way to my studio one day, it hadn’t made it to the bin, and that was significant enough to pick it up, keep it for a few days and play with it when I got the chance.

These things are space as material, 2 sides or more maybe 3, maybe an inside and an outside maybe neither. Everything is delicate if you’re delicate with it. It matters very little what it was used for before because all material is pretty unstable. I mean we recognise things as they are but, really there is very little of this world that stays as it is for very long. I think that’s the significance of these for me, not their impermanence or permanence but the fact that they are neither.

There’s no such thing as new stone.

There is fictionalised stone and manipulated stone but their atoms are all fucking ancient.

At the beginning of last year I went to stone henge with my family, it was the only time i’ve been, and I found far more moving than I had imagined I could. I got talking to one of the archaeologists who was hanging around in their exhibition space answering visitor questions, I can’t remember the whole conversation but there was something she said that stuck with me.

She said that in her opinion the needle and thread was the greatest invention humans have made.

I remember it each time I have to sew a button, or notice i’ve ripped my trousers. I remember it when I use glue and feel how inelegant it is. Theres something about sewing which feels its way around the problem of joining like nothing else. Making 2 things into 1 thing using the thing itself.

We should all learn how to sew.

The pavilion is a proposal for this sort of feeling a path through… space as material.