Copper Spur is a meditation on architectural transience in an extreme landscape. It was displayed at the European Cultural Centre in Venice, Italy, as part of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennial. In this work, a Copper Spur tent that was carried on the Larapinta Trail in the Tjoritja West MacDonnell Ranges in central Australia is presented as a ritualized itinerant architecture. The Copper Spur was repetitiously unpacked, constructed, inhabited, deconstructed and re-packed on a daily basis over several weeks. It was a companion for the solo walker, cared for and carried over a long distance; a suggestive space that listened, spoke, recorded and constantly co-created place with its mobile inhabitant.

After its journey, the fabric floor of the tent now registers the landscape as a series of intense contact points that have been burnt into its surface. Key moments of compression –  the foot upon the path and the camp upon the earth amid the deep time of geology – are registered as disappearances that vanish into an elsewhere of irreversible change. Only the imagination of a tiny wisp of smoke from each perforation exists to recall the intense and enigmatic exchange of body, earth and architecture.