The research phase is now over.
The plan is to expand on a small body of huts constructed from digital images. The existing 6 will become 16.
My friends have got used to me getting excited at the site of a corrugated iron hut and pulling off the road to leap over gates with my camera. About 130 raw images have been processed, printed, cut out, hand coloured and sorted into bins of windows, doors, roofing, wall materials and ‘miscellaneous’ and the building has begun.
The work has its roots in the Welsh tradition of the ty unnos, the one night house, which peaked around the transition from the 18th to the 19th centuries following the Enclosures Act. If a house could be built between the hours of sunset and sunrise and had smoke rising from its chimney in the morning then the builders could keep it and the land as far as an axe or hammer could be thrown. The tradition, which was never actually enshrined in law, continued into the 20th century and even in the 21st migrant workers are living in converted allotment sheds in South Wales.
In a world of unlimited budget I would have loved to build the real thing in Tbilisi; however, pragmatism rules and I have to find another way to use the space I’ve been allocated. Sharing an 8 x 40 metre space was a daunting prospect emerging from degree and graduate shows and with only a few short weeks to make the work and get it to Georgia. After a sleepless night or two I decided to turn the ‘problem’ into an asset so the 16 huts will be on a grid of plinths through the space, emphasising their isolation.
‘The hut…becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend, there exists no adjoining hut’. Gaston Bachelard
The first of the new huts is a stiff affair, still feeling my way back in. Huts 2 and 3 are better. As my friend the Junkman from Afrika might say, they dance.
