Home Remains

Home Remains navigates the terrain of loss resulting from a house fire in December 2012. The experience of this event, which destroyed not only my home but also my studio and the artwork I had made, prompted me to question the purpose of an art practice and the value I placed on material possessions. This research project explores the idea of home, a place that has informed the art practice of a number of artists including Louise Bourgeois, Gosia Wlodarczak and Do Ho Suh. Home is a place that is often returned to for comfort and stability, a place through which we build a secure sense of self. Gaston Bachelard and more recently, Sarah Robinson, have discussed home as a philosophical concept. Within this research project the idea of home is disentangled from an architectural structure and explored as a place of belonging, comfort and security that exists through creative practice itself. Two lines of investigation were developed in response to notions of memory and time. The fire highlighted the discrepancy between the experience and measurement of time, an area of interest that has influenced artists such as Daniel Crooks. Memories of the fire were used as materials from which to generate work, memories inevitably distorted by the passage of time. This research explored the indexical relationship between object and image, event and memory, by intertwining meditative and digital processes. Durational and performative works were developed as part of a process-based drawing practice. A processbased approach emphasises working with a 'not-knowing', focusing on the process of making rather than on the end result or material outcome. The drawing investigations of this research project were also informed by textile practices, introducing ideas of materiality and repetitive making processes common to many textile techniques into the discipline of drawing. This research can be considered an atlas, placing emphasis on 'mapping' as a verb, a means through which the world is described and understood. It forms a compendium ...