My home is my castle

As part of the show we wanted to create some collaborative pieces that would really bound our work. The process has been very much a group effort and we wanted work to reflect this. We also thought it was crucial that the show was as interactive as possible whilst remaining a way to show case our work. I am impressed by galleries that strive for visitors across a wider range of society that just the “Art World” and this was an ambition of ours. Leeds Art Gallery has used simple but effective ways of engaging people by allowing space for discussion. I have always enjoyed using galleries and museums as creative spaces and so I created a drawing board as an extension of my cityscape.

We also invited our visitors to build their own space by providing a good old-fashioned box fort. There are few shared memories from people’s childhood fonder than building your own castle and that pleasure was still obvious in our visitors on our opening night. What started as a fairly light-hearted idea evolved into a catalyst for some significant discussions. Next door to our show, a local church was having an evening meal for homeless people of Leeds and a lot of our visitors came across from here. Suddenly a work that explored the idea of creating our own homes took on new poignancy when viewed with people whose main form of shelter was less than we had provided as a form of entertainment. It was a really amazing experience to talk to people whose experiences of Leeds were so different from my own and whose lives were so deeply entwined with the building we were occupying.

Home was also a feature of another group work, we created a space entitled “Do you see where I’m coming from?” where we asked our visitor to mark the place they felt had been or were still there homes. The rapidly filling maps of Leeds, the United Kingdom and the entire world created links between viewers and highlighted how small the world can be.

Our final work played upon the idea of regeneration of the Merrion centre, visitors could move around the show and find miniscule scenes of reconstruction and city life. Many of these light-hearted scenes used blemishes in the room that were scaled up to provide shelter for the tiny couples and meetings. We wanted to create a purely fun representation of life for the show and these mini scenes became a way of encouraging movement around the space. We were so pleased with this collaboration that we chose it to figure-head our exhibition posters.

The group works exploration of home has a lot in common with my work as I am interested in the idea of what makes a place a home. The maps ask people that questions and the answer is sometimes hard to place geographically. The formation of a home within the space followed the same thought and questioned how we make the space that becomes important enough to be painted, photographed or drawn onto a map.