Home and Away

(not the Australian soap)

Museum of Childhood had a little exhibition of this title showing Children's ideas of home. Most are dual nationality and consider their home to be both London and their countries of origin, feeling deeply rooted in both places.

These are drawings of the places that surround where they live. (sorry about the rubbish photos)

I decided to do my own on the bus home. 

The all seeing eye

Rewind to my birthday 2008.

I went and had really awesome cheesy gnocchi with my dad at the BFI.

At the time there was a video installation by Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry.

They projected the film throughout a whole room, moving the images along each wall and slowly taking away objects as the character loses his memory.

A clip from 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' was used to signify ideas surrounding memory loss. Although this is a separate theme to mine I found it visually connected with my project because aspects of home were being subtracted from the room as the video played out.

I have since started looking at how images, like buildings disintegrate over time.

Rather than items disappearing through the process of memory I have looked at how they disappear over the process of repetition.

Each item was copied around 50 times until the image disappeared. I will be making a series called "Losing It" looking at different aspects of the home. I chose the image of a key because they're often copied after being lost and are the only things we own to 'prove' we live somewhere.  

Psycho buildings

Loved watching the film for 'Conical intersect' by Gordon Matta-Clark. 

Here's part of the footage but it might be difficult to see how good it actually looked. These are some images from the piece and a description of how it has inspired other pieces of architecture.

As I sat and watched it I got really excited about the prospect of finding an abandoned building to do something in. Anything. Just sort of play in. I find the skeletons of buildings and abandonment of something once beautiful really alluring somehow.

This is an image of Rachel Whiteread's 'Place' from the exhibition. Each house is beautifully lit and attention has obviously been paid to every one.  The sight is impressive and I like how in such numbers any one particular home seems insignificant to the others. It reminds me of how looking over a view of London you wouldn't be able to pick out where you live yet are fascinated by the amount of people living out their lives in all these buildings.

Seeing this piece directed me to look at her other work where she casts the negative space of rooms within homes and even whole buildings.

Do Ho Suh's work is equally intricate and beautiful, it directly contrasts to Whiteread's as each detail is important to his memory of home.

Lucid

This is from the same block of buildings where I used to work- I went back to visit the shop and it had been knocked down.

I'm going to use the images to project them inside homes.

Snowy February

Holidays

Summer '08

I began by going back to the Shelley Hotel in Worthing where my Dad grew up, I thought it would be interesting to take some photos and see 

what the building looked like after years of being uninhabited.

Turns out people live there now.

One of the occupiers is terrifying. 

He seemed taller than your average human and wore braces over a dirtied wife beater which strained to hold in a more than ample paunch.

He told me to stop taking photos of the toilet unless I wanted to photograph him pissing.

We didn't stick around long after that.