After contacting the artists, I received printed cards about their artistic projects. An enigmatic message from Quartzsite, Arizona, arrived earlier this year, with a Venetian postmark. "Mr & Mrs Ivan Morison think they have found a meteorite. Holding it tight in their hands they think they can feel it pulsing." All was revealed at the [Welsh Pavilion], where the framed printed card was displayed alongside their slide and sound installation Dark Star. The works document their recent US trip, finding and interviewing surviving 1970's "New Age American Gypsies," who travelled the west coast in hand-built timber house-trucks. "I don't own land - but at least I can buy an old truck and build a cabin on it and feel secure," recounted Ned Huff, whose family sold home-made lemonade at Grateful Dead concerts. They were among the forerunners of today's nomadic "Snowbirds," who live in huge self-sufficient Recreational Vehicles, over-wintering in the Arizona desert. Some collect rocks and minerals and trade them at an annual market at Quartzsite, where the Morisons found the piece of pyrite that provided the structural starting point for their Venetian works.
Their timber and glass construction Pleasure Island, in the garden courtyard behind the brewery, also derives from the pyrite sample. Here it resembles a cankerous growth, distorting the classical symmetry of the building's brick facade as it twists out from under a shaded loggia, straining to reach the sunlight and grow tall and straight like the adjacent palm trees. The structure is decorative as well as dramatic, prettily inset with panes of brightly coloured glass in homage to the stained glass used in decorating the 1970's house-trucks.
Colin Martin, And So It Goes, Landscape Architecture Australia, November 2007

Pleasure Island
2007
Timber and glass

Commissioned for the Welsh Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007