Getting up some time after midnight to collect the scattered brands together, while my companions were sound asleep, I observed, partly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a perfectly regular elliptical ring of light, about five inches in its shortest diameter, six or seven in its longer, and from one eighth to one quarter of an inch wide. It was fully as bright as the fire, but not reddish or scarlet, like a coal, but a white and slumbering light, like the glow-worm’s. I could tell it from the fire only by its whiteness. I saw at once that it must be phosphorescent wood, which I had so often heard of, but never chanced to see. Putting my finger on it, with a little hesitation, I found that it was a piece of dead moose-wood (Acer striatum)…. Using my knife, I discovered that the light proceeded from that portion of the sap-wood immediately under the bark, and thus presented a regular ring at the end, which, indeed, appeared raised above the level of the wood, and when I pared off the bark and cut into the sap, it was all aglow along the log.

 ………on my inquiring concerning the will-o’-the-wisp, and the like phenomena, he said that his “folks” sometimes saw fires passing along at various heights, even as high as the trees, and making a noise. ……. Nature must have made a thousand revelations to them which are still secrets to us. Henry David Thoreau

The interior might read as internal space, living space or an unexplored territory. Space closest to us is the most familiar yet also can be the most potent. Stripping down the elements used here to a minimum, wood effect vinyl linoleum, soft coloured shades, incandescent lighting, all have a residual resonance of the fabricated interior pointing back to the natural world they are intended to emulate.

The faked up light & plastic printed wood-grain have a yearning for the real thing, but in their isolation from a living environment, Thoreau’s ‘thousand revelations’ are left way outside and empirical experience more likely exchanged as an online share.

Personal interior space is not to be taken for granted, a right yet also a site where speculation has made the stakes so high that our own habitat has become a commodity to be speculated and traded on.

Charlotte Squire

created for ASC window space