Black Pig Lodge
2011
Coal
4x4.5x6.5m

Commissioned by Southbank Centre, London.

Supported by Walter Energy, Western Coal and the Aberpergwm Colliery, Wales

Black Pig Lodge invites visitors to shelter within a glistening chamber of polished coal sourced from a working mine in the Neath Valley, Wales. The Morisons met miners who have lived and worked through the transition of coal mining as a celebrated industry that made Britain proud, into a symbol of social decline in rural communities. In 1951 the Festival of Britain produced architecture that presented the future, in 2011 our buildings need to be designed to survive an uncertain future. The outside of the structure resembles a rough bunker-like structure based on the vernacular style of the sami turf lodge, hand built, abandoned. The inside is smooth, manufactured and polished, a space for ceremony and living, from a non-specific cultural place. Drawing on the dark mythology of the cult of the television series Twin Peaks, and global and English folklore, Black Pig Lodge presents a relic from an imagined future.
Southbank Centre, 2011