SIEM REAP, Cambodia, 4 December 2008 – In the rural village of Prolet, 17-year-old Phlat sits on the bare floor of her simple timber and thatch house and recounts the trauma she has had to overcome after being sexually assaulted.
We craned our necks at the peaks, but they were hidden in clouds, and all we could see were the flanks ripped bare of timber by avalanches.
Visitors to the Catherine Palace today see photographs of the time: The Golden Corridor as a tumbled shell of bare brick and charred timbers, its ruined floors adrift with snow.
Sometimes she works with newspaper photographs (there are lots of politicians making emphatic hand gestures), at other times with bare cubes, paper, lengths of timber or biscuit tins.
Inside the cabins, each of which measures about 30 square metres, the timber walls are bare of any decoration and the only furniture is a bed, a lamp and a couple of lounge chairs.
The timbers, partly scoured bare by erosion of the river bed, the largest up to a third of a metre in diameter, were discovered in work during exceptionally low tides last February, but carbon dating work – revealed in the new edition of London Archaeologist journal – has only recently been completed, proving that the trees were felled between 4790 BC and 4490 BC.
All that was left of the main stand were rows of bare steel and stone, with blackened timbers hanging from the few remaining roof supports.
Inventive use of copper piping, reclaimed timber panelling, corrugated iron, statement bare filament bulbs and the odd metal antique do add an industrial edge, but it's cosy at the same time.
