Disability Arts Online

Leave-Home-Stay turns the fabric of a very ordinary house into a living artwork. In the process the work encompasses aspects of disability from many perspectives. With grace and sensitivity the project faces its audience with the question of how we will respond to disability issues as they affect us in later life, as well as those which are a part and parcel of our genetic make-up and thus colour our lives from its beginnings.

After her parents' death, Christine Finn was faced with a dilemma. Was she going to sell the family home to property dealers and thus consign all her memories of her parents and her childhood to the rubbish heap? Or was she going to face the grieving process and take time to use the house as a vehicle for reflection and integration of all the stories that were asking to be told?

Her instincts as an archaeologist, journalist, and artist, were to reveal the small traces of memory, and to lay bare the beauty which is inherent within the process of fragmentation. This understanding partly came from an appreciation of Eastern philosophy, recognizing that everything is continually in a process of decay.

Leave-Home-Stay is about the beauty inherent within the transient nature of things. Christine says: “I like the idea of making an installation by revealing the layers of what is already there. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. In the downstairs front room, the house is excavated back to its beginnings, as rotten floor boards and joists were removed to reveal the very rubble of the foundations - and lying across the earth and stone, electrical cable like blood vessels, running exposed and vulnerable.

Leave-Home-Stay takes its audience into the realm of personal childhood recollection: the smells of fifties furniture, wallpaper fragments and clothing remnants, old packing cases, photographs and boxes of vinyl records. The list of mnemonics is endless. The house is a celebration of the life her parents made for themselves and that they gave to their daughter. And through that process of opening up layers of memory, the house reveals a journey into a universal experience of the human need for nurture.

In Leave-Home-Stay, the fragments you are asked to witness, offer an opportunity for reflection on your own experience of home. For me it uncovered a tantalizing and discomforting need to document something of my own epic trail. Christine Finn is keen that her audience is able to use the artwork as a way in, to make connections within their own lives. She hopes to keep it as a living artwork, using the house creatively for workshops which inspire people to record their family histories in ways other than the usual obvious ones.

“As well as the artefacts - the fragments of 1950s furniture and 1970s décor etc - it was often the smells of musty walls and rotting wood which reminded me of my grandparents and my parents' family homes. The journey around the house was overwhelming. It reminded me of how difficult I find the concept of home. A photo of fragments of original wallpaper, in the bathroom, depict the flying ducks motif - a symbol of aspiration for the working classes of the 1950s. Seeing this again here, reminded me of how much I absorbed the idea of the ducks, literally, as the need to keep moving on.”

“Growing up, as I did, in a schizophrenic house inhabited by ghosts and demons, my life has been punctuated by a restless and seemingly endless search for home. Between my late teens and late thirties, I lived in more than 130 addresses, moving mostly through areas within inner London. There are many reasons why this happened, although a large part of this journey was to do with the struggle to come to terms with the enormous fear which underpinned everything that made me. A lot of this restlessness was to do with fear of the psychiatric profession and the oppressive practices I'd been subjected to, as a child. And partly it was political and to do with being on the wrong end of Thatcher's housing policies which laid the foundation for the culture of greed, which as a nation we've learnt to embrace.”

Christine has taken her experience as an archaeologist to excavate her own life; to literally dig up and lay bare the memories the house reveals. Speaking about the process of deciding to do something so extraordinary, she says: “Throughout my professional life, I have been involved in the process of uncovering layers of stories about other peoples' lives. Through the process of creating Leave-Home-Stay I came to the realization it was time for me to be exposed”.

Leave-Home-Stay felt like a rallying cry for the need to absorb and be reconciled with the experiences that have made us who we are. A starting point was Christine's horror at the notion that the prevailing attitude is that what you are supposed to do after your parents have passed away, is to sell their home to property developers, who see their job as being to rip out all traces of a house's previous occupants.

One of the aims Christine has set herself is to open the house up to organizations like Cruse, to be used as a tool for people facing the process of grieving. She is keen to make the experience as accessible as possible. And so within the installation there is much use of film and audio clips. A soundscape created for the kitchen documents the sounds of its implements and functions, using the record facility on a cell phone. The eerie quality of the recording evokes perhaps the idea of a ghost come for one last time to move fondly over the taps and cooking implements.

As aspects of the lives of the people who inhabited this house, slowly come to life, it dawns on you that there are no books amongst the collections of photographs, music records, tools, clothes, buttons, artworks, paintings, etc. In fact amongst all the things that make up the fabric of a family's life, there is little in the way of written text. Rummaging a little deeper you find the occupants of this house were dyslexic.

In the dining room, a teak writing bureau full to bursting, is fastened with pink ribbon. It is a gesture expressing the frustration of dealing with paperwork. Christine says: “For a family of dyslexics visual and auditory experience is paramount. My father taught me how to value what you scrutinize. He gave me a love of foraging. Beachcombing was his antidote to the stresses of having to work in an office. The artwork in the garden created from detritus from the beach is a testament to love of a pastime that we shared”.

The process of creating Leave-Home-Stay meant Christine coming out as dyslexic. She was encouraged by the theme of this year's Architecture Week programme - Different Perspectives. She says: “The condition is largely misunderstood. People have a particular idea of what they think dyslexia is, when the reality is that it covers a multitude of experience. When I was a writer-fellow at Bradford University, I was asked what problems I face, as a dyslexic. My response was to say that I don't face any problems because I have always adapted ways of working creatively with the condition. If you try telling a commissioning editor that it is worth doing a programme about creative dyslexics, you'll get a poor response. Yet, if you talk to people working in the 3D field you'll find that a significant number have the condition to varying degrees.”