Cardboad Box House (2002)

A work made for building a hut out of cardboard, observing its gradual decay, and spending time inside it.

When I was in high school, I had the feeling that the drawings and music I was making were being produced within a framework prepared by someone else, and I wondered whether it might be possible to think about materials and methods of expression from scratch.

It was around that time that I encountered a homeless man spending the night on a beach, which led me to create this work.

He slept like mud, covered in sand. His feet resembled elephant skin, and his sun-scorched flesh looked like vinyl.

The mass of rags no longer appeared to have ever been clothing; it had merged with the surrounding sand, grass, and the plastic bags among his belongings. The way his body and the surrounding matter seemed to dissolve into one another made me shudder as a fellow human being sharing the same flesh.

I collected warped cardboard from the city, gathered driftwood, and erected a hut. I slept inside it, gazing at the landscape as he did, watching it all decay