Thoreau’s Room

The Collect Connect Project Brief was to design a net in response to the theme: Dwell/ Dwelling. This and instructions for assembling it, plus a photograph of how the constructed net would look, was to fit onto a sheet of A4. Contributions from thirty artists were collated in a book and the three-dimensional dwellings were ‘exhibited’ in various locations in London in 2015.

The first thing that I thought of when presented with this brief was Henry Thoreau’s hut at Walden where he lived simply, surrounded by Nature and wrote many beautiful pieces on what he experienced there.

His hut was a rudimentary dwelling (noun) and the act of observing, pondering and writing on Nature could also be considered dwelling (verb).

I was keen to break up the walls of the hut, the division between inside and out. I wished to give the sense that Thoreau was completely immersed in his surroundings and that Nature worked its way into his interior space as much as he went out in search of it. It was immensely satisfying to find, and incorporate into my design alongside woodland images, a quote written at Walden in his Journal on 3rd January, 1853: ‘I have a room all to myself; it is nature’.