This research project draws on personal experiences of home, both as a place of safety and nurture, and of fear and alienation, to explore themes of displacement and potentiality for repair, using the painted collage as a key studio-led research methodology.
Responding to theories of displacement and homelessness as intrinsic conditions of contemporary modernity, the unfixed home is reconsidered as a site of liberation or potential, with home becoming something practiced or carried, continually reassessed and reformed. This project explores new ways to visually interpret the notion of home as a space marked by precarity - often fractured or fragile; but also, as a deeply felt need and possible site of return. The research investigates distinct modes of painting and installation that can be used to articulate the experience of the precarious home as a site of both loss, and potentiality for repair.
The final works are based on collage studies; this approach draws on an understanding of collage as embodying displacement and an absent origin and is supported by the writings of Rosalind Krauss and Rona Cran, and seen in the photomontages of John Stezaker. The translation of these collages into larger paintings functions as a way to stitch the broken parts of the collage together, fusing them through the materiality of the painted surface. This rehoming of the parts within the frame of the canvas, demonstrates this modality of painting as a signifier of care and value, locating the project more broadly within theories of care.
