The Art of Shelter
Though it is not in my nature to harm our furry feathered friends I do feel inspired by the thought of killing two birds with one stone. Therefor it helps if you tend to view the world in terms of alternative reality. In language words carry so much potential connectivity that you can make sense of virtually any combination. In the world of objects continuity is not always as fluent as in speech. Objects are more concrete, correction is usually not readily available, in general objects are hard-edged and isolated to a particular use.
When words materialise, though, they speak in their own tongue. Objects can become suggestive in context. What looks like a stroke of genius, viewed as a move in the course of logical reasoning sometimes becomes so evident it could hardly have been missed. It is hardly possible to construct a formula or theory that facilitates or predicts the fabrication of alternative solutions.
Problem solving depends, apart from the creativity of the participants, on the availability of tools and material. Also basic principles play an important part, which I’d like to describe as instrumental intelligence. For example a hoop will at some point rest on a conical shape. To hang a speaker by the ring it’s supposed to stand on, I cut the top part off a cola bottle, screwed the cap on to the ceiling, put the bottle top through the ring and screwed it into the cap.
In September I have enrolled at the Limerick School for Art and Design, LSAD or just art college. Our first assignment is a project inspired on ‘PLACE’. For my project ‘Vanimal’ I have chosen to recreate my van. In itself already a double function, transportation and a place to live, which I did for 9 years. Before that I lived in a large farmhouse with 17 rooms for 30 years. To live in a van you need discipline. You can’t leave things laying about, need to have a system for where everything goes and need to be severely selective about keepsakes and trash.
Living in a confined space with limited possibilities not only makes you behave extremely economically and efficient. It also makes you orient in other kinds of space. Digital for instance, I own seven external hard drives, all together over two tetra bytes, mostly photos and videos. But also my solace laid behind my back doors, the meadow, the Rockièra and the boundless ocean.
The tendency to make the most of a situation is not only a necessity when you live in limited conditions, it also can be very rewarding. Living in the cold is extremely unattractive, but if you have the possibility to somehow warm up, that makes it a lot more bearable. I could do no better to myself than from time to time let the engine run and have the heating going. To feel my body relax and absorb the warmth is one of the nicest feelings I know, only comparable with going into the water and feel the weight of my body fade away.
Another way of dealing with the cold was to be physically active. I moved a lot of stones, out of necessity, like the kitchen I built by taking the inside out of a heap of rocks and building up the edges,
but also just for the challenge. I once found a nearly perfectly round stone that must have weighed over 200kg down at the rolling stone platform.
With the help of planks as levers I got it up to the last very steep bit. There I wrapped a fishing net around it and pulled it up the meadow with my van. It was a beautiful stone and it became part of a setting of seats, with an L-shaped,
washed up tree trunk that I had gotten there by tying a rope on both ends, ‘steering’ it across the rocks by pulling the ‘reins’ and a big rusty iron buoy that I got there in a similar way. Finding leverage was the organising principle, but specific hikes and hookups begged a spot specific action.
Living in a van has its own consequential characteristics. Houses have permanence and have incorporated solutions for climatic and social challenges, like the shape of the roof relative to wind and rain and accessibility in urban and rural settings. A van is constructed for mobility and answers to criteria of streamline and vulnerability reduction. One logical result of the properties of a van is that I could respond to change in the weather. When parked it is highly preferable to have the rear doors, in effect my front doors, in the lee of the wind. Therefor the van needed to be positioned with its nose into the wind. As the direction of the wind changes I have through the years positioned my van on any of the 360 degrees that make up a circle. This naturally implied that every so often I had a different view, not only at my rear doors, but through each and every window in my car. As obvious as this may seem, picture this situation for a house. This ads an unimaginable liveliness to your environment, which happened to be subject to continuous change itself as far as half of my panorama, the ocean, is concerned. Add to that, that the meadow was not very level, so there were noticeable deviations from horizontality and there were differences in inclination of sunshine and terrain. Sometimes I stepped out into long grass, sometimes it was sheer rock. Rain, however, would always come down from the same direction, so that I could create an extra bit of roof by placing my monofin on the roof, weighed down by a 5 liter water bottle and sticking out over the rear.
The orientation to the direction of the wind also had a consequence for the work bench I set up on the meadow.
I built it on two sturdy leg logs, each reinforced by slanting supports. For the longer leg I dug a hole 75 cm deep to anchor it, the other leg just stood on the ground. They were connected by a broad plank, the work space, mounted by a vice jaw and the end, supported by the anchored leg was attached to it by one long screw, so the other end could circumscribe it. I’d line up the workbench with the wind, park the van before it and then open my rear doors wide and built up my tent, a large sail cloth, on PVC pipes behind the van and over the work bench.
For to read: http://www.janploeg.nl/english/da_2008_en_47.html
The last two years I built a tent that stood by itself, against a stone wall, but I had left enough space around it to park my van, so that the tent could be in the lee of the van. That tent had four long legs, the pairs of which each were connected by a short plank that I could tilt to give a smaller angle to the side were the wind came from.
For to read: http://www.janploeg.nl/english/da_2013_en.php?da_id=10
Where near parking was possible I would accommodate my swimming, changing in and out inside my van, out of the wind, ideally with a cup of coffee and a burst of rock ’n roll to dance myself warm again.
The interior of my van was teeming with solutions for everyday problems. My towels needed to dry after swimming, so at night I hung them out to dry as curtains for my windows. Under my mattress I kept two sheets of plywood, so I could position one next to my bed, making it double. Vertically behind my back to lean against was half a mattress, the other half is already flat next to it. The six cut open five liter water bottles above my table are deep enough to prevent the content from spilling out on bumpy roads, yet transparent enough to easily locate items. If I want to transport bulk or large objects I can take out the ‘hardware’ in minutes. The table is detachable and the bed is fastened to the van with simple mortise and tenon joints: a drilled hole through both components and a long loose screw to prevent them from shifting. A vital component of organisation is storage. The most frequently used necessities, pens, notebook, glasses, go into the water bottles. Household tools, scissors, spanners, WD40, go in the pockets on the rear doors. In the pigeon holes is place for computer paraphernalia, magazines, dictionaries and under my bed are three fish trays, the first has miscellany, the second contains tools and materials, the third is on a rope to pull out after the first two are removed, and contains larger computer components and external hard drives. Behind that are two batteries to store the excess electricity generated by the car generator and that produced by my solar panels. A fourth, miscellaneous, fish tray is at the end of my foot space and at the end of that is my strongbox, an army ammunition case I can padlock and which is chained to the frame of the van. Between the strongbox and the separation wall to the cockpit is my fire extinguisher. In the opposite corner is my inverter, my electricity plug and the switch that (dis)connects my home batteries to the cars electrical system. so I do not exhaust the car battery. I had screwed a stick on a footplanklet, that bore my broadband aerial. On the planklet was room for two filled water bottles to weigh down the little structure in the howling winds.
My water I’d get from wells and I think I know all of them between Milltown Malbay and Blackhead. My favorite well, in Caher Valley, runs an estimated 200 liters in a minute when it’s in full swing, but the most frequented well would be in Kilshanny. There, quite prosaically the water runs out of a steel pipe into a concrete basin with intriguing water fauna.. When it’s been raining for a while it fills a five liter bottle in a minute and a half. Sometimes it comes out with so much force that the water is quite muddy. If I leave it alone for a day the mud sinks to the bottle bottom and most of it is perfectly drinkable. But when it’s been dry for a while it takes half an hour for a bottle to be filled. I found an excellent way to park the bottle so for the largest part it would fill handsfree. When I jam an empty bottle against the buoyancy of the water in the basin it gets stuck under the pipe and stays there until the water within the bottle reaches the level of the water around it. A perfect example of serendipity for the nowaday hunter.
Work video’s:
1-https://youtu.be/Mz-pCgK-hTc
2-https://youtu.be/AEYe4EyzNck
So far the iconography of my van. You can follow my project ‘Vanimal’ on Tumblr, jan-ploeg-blog.