Animal Magician's Hut - Depot Boxes
Included within Depot—Animal Magician’s Hut was a series of handmade boxes that contained notes, diagrams, drawings, photographs and sculptural elements. These boxes had been left in various spots in the Australian countryside where a mythical puma had been sighted.
I had taken interest in various systems of energy sustenance and was intrigued to determine how these systems might apply to creative processes. I had read of the use of depot boxes in polar exploration, where drops of food and sustenance for a perilous voyage were put in place to keep a traveller alive.
My depot boxes described the construction and function of a ‘spirit battery’ that might enable me to provide my own fuel for a journey into my imagination.
The instructions were divided into seven separate groups of work, placed in seven boxes and distributed to seven sites.
I had surmised that only someone on the same connecting trail of the mysterious puma would discover all of the information necessary to enable the ‘battery’ to function. To me, this was demonstrative of a general lack of synthesis in cultural understanding within contemporary civilisation. Information had become commoditised into quantitative particles, without a fluid coherence that might provide a multi-dimensional, mythic knowledge of the world.
The distribution of my depot boxes was a way of creating a disparate body of information, with connecting circuitry provided by the active presence of a mysterious beast. Only knowledge of something ‘unknown’ would connect the various elements and enable the ‘battery’ to function.
I was amused to discover that some of the depot boxes had been tampered with or taken away whilst out in the bush; I tried to imagine what a local farmer may have made of these strange packages.
Explore this theme
1. Introduction
2. Depot Boxes (You Are Here)
3. Tracks
4. Art Battery
5. Puma Search