Dark Wilderness

Part of the Building Resilience exhibition at Watt Space Gallery, 5 March - 25 April 2021, Dark Wilderness is a concept and structure which requires emotional resilience to live within. It’s a foldable, movable 4x4 meter stainless steel building. It’s the minimum amount of shelter required for Architecture Professor Michael Chapman and his dog. The building will have a receptacle for rainwater. He’ll use the water for bathing and then recycle it to water his soybean plants. He’ll produce renewable energy, hopefully enough to power his phone and laptop. The average Australian requires seven hectares to support their lifestyle. If everyone in the world lived like this, we would need more than three planet earths. Dark Wilderness explores a sustainable lifestyle for one planet, and the concessions and sacrifices required to realise this. It evokes thoughts of interconnectedness, solitude, love and individuality.