While you sleep they steal the ground beneath your feet (video stills)

I realised that civilisation always begins with digging; scratching in the dirt, a foundation for progress. But for all the building and the concrete and the double glazing, we are increasingly distanced from the natural world around us. My own fascination with digging probably came from seven years working in a garden centre, where my body gradually evolved to fit the shape of a shovel. Digging came naturally.

During the summer of 1998 I began burying a series of domestic objects as a symbolic rejection of material items and a suggestion of an assimilation with nature. In retrospect it was probably just my desire to dig.

In the early spring of 1999, I dug a hole from the inside of a tent. I then buried my shelter just as a rain storm approached and I needed it the most. The sleet was especially unpleasant...

The symbolic burial enabled a transfer from an ephemeral interior space to the more permanent exterior space of a landscape.

This was about the subtle human interactions with, and alterations imposed upon natural spaces. I like the futility of destroying my only shelter and exposing myself to the elements, disassembling boundaries between the inside and the outside.

For a brief moment I created my own space inside the tent before burying it in the ground, perhaps leaving a residue of the event and of myself behind.

The title is a little paranoid; it was just a lyric stolen from a song.

© 1999 Paul Anders Johnson

(Lyric from "Sale of the Century" by Cable)