Video Installation, Mills College Art Museum, 2014
**The Container House is available for temporary or long-term exhibition/installation in an arts or public space. Also available on lease for use on a private property. For inquiries, please contact sarahbeckstromstudio@gmail.com.* *
Project Statement
The Shipping Container Home Project is an on-going, dynamic creative project I began in 2013 while in the graduate MFA program at Mills College in Oakland. The house was built using 90% reclaimed materials and this video series is a documentation of my engagement with the creative process of designing and building this shipping container house, not so much "How-To" videos. In 2013, when I started this project, there was not much information published on shipping container architecture, just a few obscure videos from Costa Rica and New Zealand...and so, much of my approach was pretty DIY but based on good research as I designed the house in conjunction with a Green Design architecture course at UC Berkeley. I built the house in Oakland outside the Mills College Art Museum and earned awards from The ReUse People of America - The 2014 1st Place Winner for Building and ReModeling in the National ReUse Contest - and the Mills College Graduate Arts Department – The Hung Liu Prize.
The project as a whole has included the 8’x20’ shipping container house with roof garden and the documentation of the creation process that consists of research documents, photos, a full-length movie, and documentary video shorts of my engagement with building the house. As well, it originally included a variety of events/happenings in and around the house. Overall, the house is meant to be considered as an arts installation as well as utilized as a functional tiny home. The interest was to merge or dissolve the boundary between art and life and to inspire consideration around what it is to live life sustainably creative or, creatively sustainable.