Roof-pile-fire: an amateur’s Shedboatshed
In 2005 the English artist Simon Starling won the coveted Turner prize with a work called Shedboatshed. The work involved the artist dismantling a shed, making a boat out of its parts, then paddling the boat and the remainder of the material down the River Rhine to be re-made back into a shed in a museum in Basel.
This strategy of situating the work’s subject as ‘the labour expended to produce it’ (Mark Godfrey, Frieze Magazine) is a common trope within Starling’s oeuvre. The final works he puts on show on the gallery is the mere tip of the iceberg of his production procedures, which instead of hiding like the majority of artists, he foregrounds as the main content of his work. In Kakteenhaus (2002), Starling drove a cactus from the Andalucian desert to a Berlin gallery in his red Volvo. The cactus stood tall in the gallery, with the Volvo’s engine – removed from the car, but still running – maintaining a perfect temperature for cactus sustenance through a network of heating pipes.
Although I have nothing to show for it apart from some photographs – no video, no proposal to take over a gallery space, and no sculptural product – throughout this Summer at my parents house (where I have been based) I have witnessed a regenerative, circular process of production, recycling and consumption, that has at least some of the hallmarks of Starling’s process-exposing art.
One of the changes that has taken place during the conversion of my parent’s house from a temporary log cabin to a permanent farmhouse (meeting all the building regulations) has been to install a thermal blanket over the roof of the existing cabin and put on a new roof. Rather than installing the insulation from the inside, as is conventional, my parents’ builders ripped off the existing roof and installed insulation from the outside, with the new roof going on top of it. The warm weather made this possible and the external nature of the work caused minimum disruption inside and did not ruin the existing internal ceiling. Another benefit was a glut of leftover tongue and groove timber that had formally been the roof.
This excess is a sort of brown gold in a climate of rising fuel costs (for wood as well as gas and oil), and my parents stacked it up in an unconventional log pile. Less handsome than cylinders of chestnut, more like a massive IKEA project gone wrong.
The amount of excess wood has provided my parents a handy fuel supply for the winter. And although there is still slight residue of tar on some of the planks, my Dad simply said that we should burn these pieces of wood one at a time. Each day more and more of the old roof is brought in for fuel. This wood will keep my parents warm throughout the long, harsh winters that the South-East has become accustomed to recently!
Yet the circle of material-production-consumption does not end at the neat idea that the roof is now heating the house, but goes further into Starling-esque realms of intricacy. The wood from the old roof, now fuel, goes a lot further because the new roof – insulated to the hilt – increases energy efficiency. The timber of old roof that took the rain, ice and winds of many seasons is now coming to the end of its days in the most productive manner.
