Raiders of the Lost Ark.
A log cabin in the middle of Sydney’s central business district, filled with sixty-nine taxidermy animals surrounding two figures on a bed in the act of coitus. The work is an articulation of unease – a perversion of Henry David Thoreau’s time spent at Walden Pond in the mid 1800s. It is a study of mankind’s relation to nature and also mankind’s relationship to its own built environment. For although the log cabin looks incongruous within the modern cityscape it could be misread as some kind of historical reconstruction, informing the public in regard to the nature of architecture in the area, two hundred years ago- a commemoration to white Australian culture’s humble beginnings. But the presence of stuffed animals around the entangled couple brings our awareness back to the incongruity of the ‘permanent’ built shelter within the early colonial natural environment. This original denial of natural environment seems to have only created a new built environment that still carries the ghost of white man’s alienation within the landscape.