Sunday 1 November 2009

Home sweet home



This excellent exhibition at the Hub Gallery, Sleaford, brings together work from recent UK graduates who are inquiring into the subject of domesticity with a twist, which mirrors my own work on the uncanny and subverting the domestic. I thought Emily Winning’s boxed sets of do it yourself ceramic tea sets were a witty addition to the patched up cups and saucers available in many galleries. Rebecca Fairman’s Cold comfort was a clever twist on the child’s quilt, made entirely of ceramic blocks impressed with lace but looking uncannily like a soft, comforting quilt. Charlotte Agius’ mop and brush made of hair were deliciously unsettling and her chair sewn together with hair reminded me of Doris Salcedo. The star of the show was Beatrice Baumgartner’s ‘La maison oubliee’, a home made dolls house in which ‘traces of human presence had been consumed by nature’s incessant force’. Beside the house a DVD of stop frame animation showed how the disintegration of the house had occurred, it lasted for 9 minutes, but held me and many other visitors spellbound from start to finish.

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