One can find inspiration in the visual aspect of a renovation site.
The accumulation of building materials, the weird equipment, and machines, the bunch of cables, roughed up walls, creates an unusual topography, familiar to architects and contractors, and most of the time painful to watch for the clients. Yet for those who spend hours and days in the dust and rubbles of the site, the appeal of this environment is not fully appreciated; it is not that usual to spend time finding beauty and poetry in the ephemeral state of decay and destruction of floors, walls and ceilings.
Yet for the most curious, one can find a great subject for photography, macro or bokeh shots of details that were not here yesterday and will no longer be there tomorrow.
The man-made wabi-sabi quality one can encounter in the cracks of a plastered wall, a pile of broken bricks, a rusty saw blade challenges the notion of wear and tear without the impact of time and is full of contradictions: it is man-made yet unintentional and ephemeral. It’s the result of some violent action, frozen in time.
Looking closely at those random shapes, one can make them tell more than what they are: this half removes plaster draws a face that could be revealed with one or two strokes; this half torn wallpaper creates a silhouette that could become a group of troll-like figures; that round sawblade hooked on the wall, could be a furry outfit with a bit of imagination, etc… you get the drill…
Walking the site after the client’s meeting, when the contractor and his team are gone, allows one to validate the decisions taken during the day, to sketch in situ the altered concepts, and to wander in this everchanging landscape, revealing every day new opportunities for drawing on plaster.
