Throughout the summer of 2014 I began working outdoors on a fenced site located in an urban wilderness close to Nottingham City Centre, overlooked by the disused and ruined remnants of industrial buildings and newer offices and hotels. During this period I met a number of other site users 'Skateboarders', 'BMXers' or 'Rollers' who were constantly building up and tearing down ramps and obstacles only to be 're-configured' by the next group. Homeless people visited often and created ramshackle shelters for themselves for a few days before moving on.

 

In accessing the site and using the decades-old found materials it became an outdoor studio that I visited frequently.  A number of themes began to emerge,  one of these was the notion of 'shelter' explored through experimental works in a series of  brickworks and wooden booth-like towers.

 

A reference caught my eye about  'The Festival of Booths'  which commemorates the 40-year journey of the Israelites in the wilderness. Jews today continue to observe this time by building and dwelling in temporary shelters, just like the Hebrew people did while wandering in the desert. In these 'Seven Booths'  fragile dwellings in the form of 'booths'  symbolise  the temporal nature of our bodies.

 

'We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens' and  ‘In spite of our material possessions, we are still physical, mortal human'.