Little Boxes | an installation | 2014

Little boxes on the hillside, / Little boxes made of ticky tacky, / Little boxes on the hillside, / Little boxes all the same. / There's a green one and a pink one / And a blue one and a yellow one, / And they're all made out of ticky tacky / And they all look just the same. /
Malvina Reynolds

This commission was to ‘make the space of Cambridge Junction perform’. Standing on the stairs, looking down at the tiles that cover the ground floor, I immediately thought of the rooves of houses. So many, all identical.

Little Boxes is a city built out of theatre supplies – LX tape, gaffer tape, and Sharpie. It’s a city somewhere between a naïve child’s playmat and a surveilled Google Earth. It has no-one in it, except all of you. And you’re Godzillas to this tiny place. As you inhabit this too regimented suburbia, trample on it and bring it to life under your feet, you don’t destroy it - because even if it was built forever, it would never rise up.

Little Boxes was first presented as part of Night Watch 2014 at Cambridge Junction.

Images © Hester Chillingworth & Claire Haigh