New Work: Porcelain Cabin

Monday, May 26, 2008

New Work: Porcelain Cabin

In the mid 20c. the Swiss architect Le Corbusier built a modest cabin retreat for himself on the French Riviera in Roquebrune. He built it shoulder to shoulder with a cafe and would take his meals by entering into its dining room through a "ship's door." It was an intentionally incomplete project, and one fraught with the contradiction of a life both searching for self-sufficiency, emancipation, natural dependence, and a way of living that was not explicitly Western. The porcelain cabin exists in the tradition of American projects like Thoreau's Walden and Le Corbusier's primitive hut ... it is not only a search for a first architecture, but the possibility of also being a last architecture... a project which questions the durational expectations of dwelling.

It is not incidental that Le Corbusier mysteriously drown in 1965 while swimming in the warm Mediterranean waters just off the rocks from his Petit Cabanon.

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Artist Biography

Born 1976. Rochester, NY

Lives and Works in Los Angeles, CA

Heather Scott Peterson was born into a family of artists and makers. One of her maternal great-grandfathers was a syndicated cartoonist and an animator of early Walt Disney films. The other owned a violin shop in turn of the century New York. In 1979 her uncle, a minor American artist living in New York, took her to Walter de Maria's recently opened Earth Room, which set off life long palpitations between art and architecture. Having finally realized that she was decidedly a hypenate, she has worked at the feral edges of both disciplines for over a decade. She graduated from RISD in 1998 with a BFA in painting. While there she spent three years poaching creative writing classes at Brown University, and spent a year in Rome, Italy on RISD's European Honors Program. In 2001 she moved to Los Angeles, to begin her Master degree in Architecture from SCI-Arc which she completed in early 2005. In the winter of 2003 she lived on the Swiss-Italian border and worked on ideas for subversive urbanism in Milan, which looked at gypsies and criminals as case studies. She has won several writing fellowships and teaches at a number of art, architecture, and design schools in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a large and painfully labor-intensive sculpture on the history of naming, an imaginative reconstruction of Goya’s Quinta del Sordo, a contemporary agora made from quarried salt, and several books.

Artist Statement

In the 19th century, the German architect Gottfried Semper, would commonly tell his university students his own version of a founding myth of architecture. As a peddler of the origin and relevance of textiles his story begins with the craft of weaving as a pre-condition. A man is walking through the desert carrying a carpet. As the man grows tired and the wind begins to blow he unrolls the carpet, sits down to think and he pulls the carpet up against himself. After some time his arm grows tired from holding up the carpet, so he gathers some sticks to hold it up. As the wind blows harder the sticks become insufficient, and the man now gathers a series of stones to help brace it. The question that Semper provokes is which part of that is the wall; which part of that is the architecture. For Semper, it is the carpet, and despite the lapse of two technologically driven centuries striving to prove otherwise, I am also a devout disciple of the carpet. Because the carpet is not merely a carpet, it is the deep structure of our cultural imagination… the surface on which we have contemplated our histories, our realities, and our fictions. And before it was carried out into the desert and asked to perform the survivalist mechanism on which architecture has been hinged, it was an artifact of representation. A surface on which heraldry and monarchy were invented, or at least complicit. A surface which co-evolved with the histories of painting, sculpture and literature. A cartographic surface on which wars were fought, lands discovered, crops grown, and nuclear payloads dropped.

It is the surface on which I work; one where the status of representation is at stake on multiple fronts, a place in the wild where the visual and the literary meet. It is a way of living imaginatively beyond my means, where the drawing is a provocation of worlds which may have been and of worlds still possible.

Monday, May 26, 2008