Reconstructing Home 2019

Reconstructing Home explores the expression of domestic space: what home interiors tell us about their inhabitants. The home is an intimate, living space – it changes with us, containing memories and tracing relationship trajectories. The ubiquitous dinner table is often the main or solitary site where a family congregates altogether. The scene can quickly flip from one of communion to one of tension and conflict: judgement, ridicule, anger, tears, silent treatment, eating disorders – this is where the dramas of family life are most frequently played out.

The work also uses artifice to question the veracity of both memory and photography: although the scene in the photograph is real in that it exists in physical space, it is not a real-scale liveable house. The construction and presentation aim for realism, framing the scene to omit the visual cues lying just beyond the borders that would indicate more clearly the true nature of the image, but the room, and hence the photograph, are fiction. This also evokes the dichotomy of how we present our lives and homes to those outside our intimate circle: the idealised public face against the reality, which tends to be a lot messier, both physically and emotionally.