“I’m interested in exploring ideas of success – how we as a society define it, what it means to achieve it – and how and where ideas of comfort, risk, happiness, and fulfillment fit in along this journey. I wanted to start by giving a little bit of background to the piece, so I’m going to read something I wrote back in May of 2013:
I don’t want to share my driveway anymore.
I don’t want to share walls with my neighbors.
I don’t want to have overbearing landlords.
I don’t want to have giant cockroaches in my kitchen.
I don’t want doors that just kind of work and windows that can’t open because they are painted shut…
So we are moving to a cabin in the woods. Not really the woods, or really a cabin… but a 20 foot shipping container on our own property under a tree canopy surrounded by wild Texas spring onions. The house is in process – things are moving but no ground has been broken…but we are getting there. In the meantime we will live in our 160 square feet on half an acre of land with no electricity, no plumbing, no sewage, no running water. Together with water jugs, solar generators, gas generator, propane, batteries, and a solar shower we will completely remove all of societies comforts and live humbly.
It is kind of scary and almost completely nuts. I feel excited and nervous but in a strange way also elated – we have two tickets to paradise.
I believe 2013 was when Houston started to experience the beginning of its housing boom. My partner Zak Miano and I had no luck in finding a decent and affordable place to live. We were lucky though to have found and bought this piece of land to eventually build a home. So instead of renting a place, we purchased a 20’ shipping container, cut out windows and doors, insulated it, put up sheetrock, and made it our home…as best as we could… for the next 3 years.
Quilts are traditionally made to commemorate major life events, so this piece replicates the floorplan, at actual scale, of one piece in our crazy journey to becoming a homeowner – and yes, the house has been built and we are back on the grid! The two slippers are there to invite you to walk on it and explore.”
(presented in 2017 at Lawndale Art Center as part of the Big Show Slide Show)
Read more about our journey to homeownership in “How to Build: a house, a life, a future” (2019)
