The Pulverised Palace

The Pulverised Palace is inspired by the ‘House of Dust’ – a vision of the underworld from The Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian story of over 4000 years old, recorded in different versions on clay tablets, fragmented, dispersed, later reconstructed.

The House of Dust is a place from which there is no return, and the crowns of those who were formerly kings are left in a pile at the door. It is a place where human meaning is lost. Everything here is made of clay and dust, and these too are the food and drink of the inhabitants.

Tim Spooner and Anne Ayçoberry are interested in this relentlessly neutral place, where everything is equivalent to everything else. Elsewhere, outside, the inhabitants of the world are endlessly building and destroying things. Here, these cycles are a distant memory.

Tim and Anne explore this place using small solid clay urns, and interacting with them in a restricted and shallow space. The Pulverised Palace is another of Tim’s pieces in which objects, performance and sound are brought together to create a strange and poetic world on stage.