Leave-Home-Stay
Leave-Home-Stay photo by Christine Finn
As part of Architecture Week, Christine Finn turned her childhood home into an arts installation. Colin Hambrook talks about the impact the work made on him.
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.
last updated: 2007-08-27 17:06:24
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tags : review disability arts visual arts