What is left within a space after our bodies inhabit it? Often we focus on the presence of a body in a space but the absence of that body and the residue that it leaves behind is something entirely different.
With my installation Custos Cavae “Guardian of the Hollow”, I look at the car park as a space that signifies the absence of the body. The car park is a space devoid of any human or animal presence. We use the space as storage – car storage – a place to mind our belongings while we are away. To me this creates a sense of emptiness, loneliness and dread; Nothing is the occupant of the car space.
What if our presence in this Nothing Space left a residue, the residue of hundreds of people simply passing through, leaving their possessions to be minded by Nothing? Custos Cavae is a work that embodies the human residue within the car space. This work personifies the accumulation of the people who have passed through, briefly inhabiting the space, even if for only a moment. This creature is, in essence, the sole inhabitant of the Nothing Space of the car park. Installed on the basement level of a Kings Cross car park, the work manifests as a hair covered pillar dotted with glass animal eyes of different colours and sizes. From the ceiling to the floor, this hairy monstrosity is a totem of our absence (yet presence) within the space.
Custos Cavae is the id of our collective coexistence. It is the becoming of pure energy, of base instincts. It is an instinctual force that has germinated from the stain of our dwelling within the space. It is base in is existence, a deity of nothing, of the empty, the hollow. It is a New God emerging in a climate of disbelief, shunned to the basements and decaying spaces of the urban world, a world with no room for a creature such as this.
It is a corporal being made of intangible components. This creature has grown out of the space and though it looks alien, monstrous even, it is a creature of human decent, the mutant offspring of the car park and its users. Its animal eyes look on, they gaze over the space with a beast-like guardianship, the kind of watching one senses from a loyal or curious animal. Its synthetic make-up is reflective of the fabricated nature of the space its self, a space that is man-made, that holds the components or objects of our existence. There is nothing organic about the car space; hence there is nothing organic about the creature that inhabits it.
Custos Cavae is one being of many. This creature is not singular in its species, more exist we are simply unaware of them. What can be found when we bother to look, to feel those spaces otherwise avoided or ignored? More creatures become apparent in their inhabitation of Nothing Spaces as I continue to investigate and unearth them.