Soldered brass, steel, 23 x 19 x 19, 2018.
Created in residence at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland.
A spirit house is set up on a property so that the guardian of the land has a dwelling of its own and no reason to resent the people living there. The custom is a courtesy extended by a newcomer to the place’s prior occupant. A work made during a residency and placed in an Irish garden takes up that position exactly. The artist is a guest, and the house is what a guest leaves for the host.
The setting supplies the rest. The frame stands in a knot garden, a plan of interlocking beds and clipped borders, a drawing made on the ground. The house is the same kind of drawing turned upright: a few lines for walls and roof, with nothing between them. The garden maps the place from above, and the frame outlines a dwelling in elevation. Because the house has no walls, the field, the wood and the sky fill it, so the place being lodged is also what shows through the frame. In frost and low light the brass catches the sun and the surrounding grass stays pale, and the house reads as a window on its own site.
The pedestal is a weathered stone column with a stepped cap, of the type that carries a sundial. The brass house occupies the place where a gnomon and dial would stand, so a house for a presence replaces an instrument for measuring hours. A sundial tells time from the shadow it casts, and the frame throws a shadow too, but nothing on it can be read. The house keeps no hours. Whatever lives in it is not on the garden’s schedule.
The lichen and the worn granite give the support an age the brass lacks. The stone plinth plays the role of the spirit house’s post, and its height places the dwelling above the human ground of the beds and paths. The pitched roof is the plainest sign of “house”, the shape a child draws for any dwelling, so the idea of shelter reaches the viewer before any specific tradition does. The tradition arrives with the title and the raised post, and it fits the garden’s own history of leaving small places for what cannot be seen.
