1996

At about this time I had become fascinated by Derrida’s assertion that ‘there is no outside-text’, and also by the quasi-phenomenon of quantum entanglement, and I was starting my investigation into how these might be interacting. (vis. As well as Derrida’s statement being philosophical, might it also pertain to our actual physical condition? Might we, beyond the sensory confines of our own worlds actually be a singularity of difference?) I decided to make a House of Eight Rooms – eight spaces in which the text of each guide could be surrounded by things of no specified meaning – at least not within that context. The idea was to set up eight spaces or rooms, for the text within to be laid out in close association with the ‘natural’ world it sought to describe. But the sites chosen for the building of the rooms would not be situated in or near woodland, but rather in industrial areas, at the tops of mountains, in the sea, or on beaches. By doing this I hoped to set up opportunities for people – passers-by – to interrogate or deconstruct of the assumptions made by the texts as to the existence outside their texts of ideal things such as trees. Is there actually a tree?

Each room is a differently shaped outline with a door, and each would have a core structure of reinforced concrete to which fired ceramic tiles were applied. These tiles would have been made by press moulding wet terra-cotta clay onto the bark of the trees signified by the text. (In this way I hoped to offer a more symbolic language structure – a kind of cross-reading of the trees signified in the text of the book.) The floor of each room would be covered ceramic tiles of the same shape as the room outline, and into which had been incised the entire text of the guide concerned. So, for example, the second room is hexagonal and relates to guide 2, entitled ‘The Management of Lowland Beech and Ashwoods’ the text of which would be incised into its hexagonal floor tiles…