A Dream in the House of Sculpture
No one knew why the house was changing in the extraordinary ways that it was. Explanations varied locally. There were rumours that the house was built on top of an underground lake, situated within a huge cave-like landscape. There were stories of the discovery, in the early nineteenth century, of a Roman well that gave partial access to this subterranean realm. The entrance to this well – supposedly covered with a large bronze, shield-like disc - was sealed some time ago and no one had been able to locate it since. Other tales in circulation suggested that the property was situated in a place where unexplained force fields coincided. As a curious result of this, distances between objects often became very difficult to ascertain. Things that were very close could appear several metres away. Two dimensions and three dimensions also overlapped, and things that looked solid could appear flat and layered, like veils or skins. Other people said that the house was located directly underneath a huge hole in the sky, which could flatten or stretch anything under it. They talked about time, saying that watches didn’t work there properly and that clocks either stopped or behaved erratically. Alarm clocks would go off randomly in the house as if night and day were one and the same.
Whatever tiny fragments of truth there might have been in these stories, there was no doubting the fact that since the sculptor had moved there, just over two years ago, the physical fabric of the building had changed substantially. The photographs he took demonstrated these changes clearly. Some had been drawn over in a black pen to indicate where the building originally began and ended. The pitched roof seemed to be the first to go and over a few weeks plateaued to a flat one. As this change was reaching its culmination, other things changed indoors. The corners of each of the rooms all gently swelled outwards to create a curved surface, bridging the perpendicular walls from floor to ceiling. Soon there was not a single corner left in the house.
While this was happening, holes – always circular or oval – opened like portholes within many of the walls. Some were small, about the size of dinner plates, others much larger. These apertures were either transparent or opaque, but translucent. Many afforded unexpected views onto other rooms, either from below or above, and sometimes they offered surprising new windows onto the surrounding gardens. On the odd occasion, these holes appeared in walls where objects, such as paintings and sculptures, had formerly been placed. One hole, for example, assumed the exact spot that an African mask was previously hanging, its fixed wooden stare now replaced by a single eye-like void. One particularly large oval window at the back of the house replaced a small aluminium air vent to give a spectacular view of the hills lying beyond the property. This was, he said, a particularly nice place to sit and watch the summer sun go down. The warm orange and pink evening sunlight colouring the curved walls of the interior. Inner worlds and outer worlds came together beautifully at dusk. Sometimes the walls looked burnished or patinated, as if made of metal - sometimes like copper, at other times like brass or gold. These briefly metallic walls took on pink or rosy hues from time to time too and, on the odd occasion after it had rained, a rainbow effect glowed tantalisingly around the room, like a thin film of oil on the surface of water.
However, perhaps the most dramatic change was to the staircase. Once a grand and central feature of this majestic old house, travelling up and down with a vertical and zig-zagged elegance, it gradually broke up, fragmenting into smaller flights of stairs and sets of steps. Often slightly ill-fitting - what he called architecturally ‘off register’ - these steps and mini-flights of stairs gave access to different parts of the house. Some of these new staircases had also revolved, reorientating themselves 90 or even 180 degrees, not only affording access to different floors, but also to new spaces that did not appear on the property’s original floor plan. Often small in size, these interstitial and cell-like areas sprung up in various places. Most didn’t have doors and so allowing open access. Some had small round windows, either at the top near the ceiling or at floor level.
A structural surveyor had recently conducted a detailed survey of the house and the findings were fascinating. The house seemed to be changing not only all by itself, but also directly in response to all the other changes that were occurring, as if caught in some kind of perpetual, architectural transition. It was a house of endless possibilities. A new room would generate a new portal-like window, a new set of steps would lead to new levels – often, it seemed, with small circular or elliptical platforms, sometimes no more than two or three metres in diameter. The sculptor was particularly fascinated by these changes and would monitor them closely for a while. Sometimes he would count the steps to see how many new ones had appeared - or how many had disappeared – but he soon stopped doing this since the changes were too constant and ongoing. At other times, he would walk around the house again and again, using different steps and walkways to enable different vantage points and vistas, trying to work out how many ways of there were of getting from one part of the house to the other.
It wasn’t easy though. Sometimes he felt like he was caught within a circular labyrinth or maze. He even ruminated once that he might be inhabiting the symbol of Ouroboros, that of a serpent eating its own tail, but it was more complicated than that. This was a Medusa-like snake that was growing heads and shedding its skins endlessly. At other times, he felt as if he were walking simultaneously around both the inside and the outside of a cylinder or a drum-like structure, looking into it and out of it at the same time. The journey was never spiral-like, or predictable in any way, and sometimes he even found himself at the bottom of the house and at the top simultaneously, looking down at the ceiling and up at the floor. The house could play tricks on you, at once disorientating and inviting you to recalibrate your sense of scale and your bodily relationships with the place.
He often found himself caught in quite tight, narrow spaces between what he thought were walls, but actually turned out to be thin translucent screens, rather like tracing paper, that had started to appear. Sometimes these thin screens were coloured: browns, reds, oranges, tea and coffee-like ochres and other warm autumnal colours. He felt briefly trapped between these thin wall-like layers, but not unpleasantly so, as he also knew that they would soon reconfigure themselves, acquire apertures or disappear altogether. In one part of the house this, however, never happened and layer upon layer of different coloured and shaped screens amassed vertically, one in front of the other. Wall thickness became increasingly difficult to judge and assessing the distances between rooms and levels impossible. Moreover, because of the mist that was everywhere around this property - inside and outside, and passing easily between walls - any accurate spatial assessment was hindered even further.
Walking around the house one evening, he discovered a whole new area, comprising numerous different sized rooms, that he’d never noticed before. He used one of these rooms - a small one that he had had to get down on all fours to crawl into – to listen to music in for a few days. The acoustics were very good there, but he stopped doing it when he realised that the sound also travelled perfectly from there throughout the whole building. Because of this, he just let it pipe its way around the house so he could listen to it as he went about his work. Much of the time it was Philip Glass’s music that he played. Einstein on the Beach was his favourite. Sometimes, however, the music was left playing on a loop all night because he couldn’t find his way back to the room to turn it off. He learned never to leave things important things, such as keys and rings, in these rooms. His spectacles, for example, always now hung around his neck from a ribbon, like an award for looking.
What was at first a very disturbing situation had soon, he said, become an enjoyable one. The trick was simply to relax into it, rather than let it constrain or worry you. The house even kept you ‘on your toes’ and in recent weeks, things were getting even more interesting. He was beginning to notice that the hill behind the house was changing.
He decided to put out a chair facing the hill and spent every afternoon – sometimes late into the evening - looking carefully at it. Scrutinising its contours, he saw that the hill was rising and falling. At times it looked a bit like a human being lying down on their side and at other times like the curvilinear forms of an art deco motor car. He also saw round holes beginning to appear in the ground, some small, others much larger. They looked to him like boreholes, small sinkholes or the beginnings of tunnels. It was impossible, however, to monitor these developments with any precision because they were curiously both quick and slow to occur, at once gradual and within the blink of an eye. The drifting mist didn’t help either. These recent changes, however, were different to the previous ones, that was for sure. Things were spreading and extending beyond the house and into the surrounding landscape.
Jon Wood, 2022
