Super Dakota

“The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the wall of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.” – The Waves


Virginia Woolf placed birds and birdsong prominently in all of her novels and most of her shorter works, an obsession that went deeper than her fiction. In one of her final, unpublished essays, “Anon”, she theorizes that all lyrical poetry, and indeed literature itself, began with human interpretation of birdsong.


At her home in Monk’s House in East Sussex, she mainly wrote in a wooden shed that stood in the garden. In the writing lodge, Virginia wrote mainly in the mornings and it was here that she produced Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, and Between the Acts. Leonard, her husband, describes her walking out to work at the writing lodge “with the regularity of a stockbrocker”. In a letter to her lover Vita Sackville-West, she describes this commute: “I wake filled with tremulous yet stready rapture, carry my pitcher full of lucid and deep water across the garden.” This shed is next to a chestnut tree, the bells of the church next door can be nearly heard, and, remarkably, the shed is surrounded by the singing of the birds in the garden that accompanied her writing, and perhaps, we can imagine that her writing is a translation of the singing of the birds.


But this writing lodge had the disadvantages that it’s too cold for writing in the winter, at which point she has to move back into her bedroom.

"The small sculpture-model by Yue Yuan (°1989, CN), artist and curator who graduated from HISK in 2023, asks visitors to explore the place in its most unusual corners, since it is perched high up, like a birdhouse – birds, always. Yue Yuan only creates his works in situ, they are unique pieces. Straight from the conceptual tradition, sometimes absurd and facetious, always with a very delicate sensitivity, they invoke protocols and elevate the context into a subject. The artist was therefore naturally guided by Patrick towards the reading of The Waves, and reproduced a replica of the cabin – in other words, the "room of one's own" – in which Virginia Woolf wrote, in the tranquility of her garden." Maud Salembier