Reviews

HOUSE-BOUND exhibition by              6 - Woman Alliance Gas House  Gallery at Beach Creative, Beach House, Herne Bay, Kent,                  29th October – 11th November 2021    Review of exhibition by Jenny Fairweather. 

Artists: Andrea Cornish, Jenny Fairweather, Joan Hobson, Jenny Kallin, Karen Simpson, Veronica Tonge. 

HOUSE-BOUND as an exhibition was originally planned over two years ago but has been postponed from early 2020 more than once due to the Covid19 Pandemic. It is billed as a show featuring the artists’ obsessions with house and home, which it certainly delivers on. However, it also reflects a very difficult 18 months of disruption of normal life, lockdowns, isolation, actually contracting Covid and widespread fear of infection. “An exhibition about house and home: reflections on lockdown, our place in family history, preconceptions of life in the past, political and social concerns, the meaning of the fabric of the house and personal connections to domestic objects”. This is a description of and my personal response to the artworks in HOUSE-BOUND. I am extremely proud to be part of this group of artists and such an exhibition, which ranges widely while keeping to the theme. 

Andrea Cornish’s pieces in the first room comprise  HERE HEAR and INNER STOREY.        INNER STOREY is a doll’s torso with the voice box removed. The space has been lined with tiny books, as in a library and there is a weak light above. In HERE HEAR the voice box is surrounded by small faces of time like miniature clock faces - one is reminded of time passing. ‘When the handle is turned, the tiny record inside the voice box now produces an unintelligible sound.’ It is as if the doll has been hollowed out, leaving no understandable voice; the croaking sound is not like a voice now and makes one feel uncomfortable. The voice box doesn’t seem to be able to return to the torso. 

The doll has no head, arms or legs, therefore shows a painful illustration/representation of a person who has little means of communicating, nor of movement. This could be a metaphor for a personal circumstance or for a wider view on repression of voices such as the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan. The books within the torso hold out hope for knowledge, memories and hopefully strength to regain the voice. This is a powerful linked piece which can be interpreted in many different ways. 

Jenny Fairweather presents four works, two of which are linked. HOUSE-BOUND: UNSAFE, UNSELLABLE is a piece reflecting the before and after in the current crisis of anxieties for residents of apartment blocks, post-Grenfell.       

Made from old prints, Jenny depicts the comfort of home on the left, Home in lettering emphasising the feeling. On the right a fire has charred the flats and a ghostly child-size figure appears to fall. Discomfort and anxiety are increased by the charred looking house-shaped print backdrop. The ‘after’ in the current crisis is ongoing with countless individuals and families affected by being bound in to flats they no longer feel safe in nor can afford. Jenny wanted to show the formerly ideal garden and family home of this old family cottage, EARMARKED FOR DEMOLITION, PRESTON HALL COLONY, MAY 2015. Progress meant that this and 6 other cottages would be bulldozed to make way for a fast-food outlet and supermarket. The locus of family memories was to be lost, but maybe as in BEECHCROFT (below) and INNER STOREY (above) memories are never wiped out.                                    

                                                                                                                                BOHEMIA, GLIMPSES OF INTERIORS 1 AND 2 show the run-down and

abandoned interior of a vintage doll’s 

house, which could easily be a real house, but not a safe feeling space. Will inhabitants be trapped forever on the stairs? The darkness and atmosphere of both prints increases the feeling of being trapped. Could one live in these 

interiors? These photos raise these questions. 

                  

BLUE PLAQUES by Joan Hobson, are made with digital photography accompanied by text. Joan shows us photographs memorialising where she has lived over the years, with whom and what she was doing at the time. As Joan says “Blue plaques are often attached to buildings where famous people once lived. We ordinary folk are bound too, by our memories, to places where we once lived.” one photograph for each placeshows us an historic image, paired with a contemporary image of Joan outside the house. There is a melancholy around the passing of time, while celebrating family ties, renewal and happiness in her life. The work is imaginative and fresh, while conjuring ideas of time and memory.

Joan’s BEECHCROFT appears to be a linked piece to the Blue Plaques work. It is a re-creation of two rooms in Joan’s childhood home in mixed media. The house has now been demolished and replaced by blocks of flats. This time people are remembered as coming and going in the house over time. Tiny photographs, taken by Joan when around 10, are stood up or seated around the rooms in a sort of tableau alongside images of her. “They represent not just my own family, but also all those loved ones missing from our lives during lockdown”. I see this artwork as about the passage of time, memory and loss, feelings both hugely personal but also standing for the universality of feelings of sadness and nostalgia for times gone by with family and friends - also the global losses of the pandemic. In this way, though personal to Joan, it speaks eloquently to all our memories, bereavements and joys. 

Jenny Kallin has produced a set of 6 lively recycled boxes and dolls houses that reflect the feelings of life restricted to the house during the pandemic, House-Bound Numbers 1 – 6. They are decorated with Jenny’s intricate drawings and collaged cuttings often from The Guardian newspaper. In all we sense that inhabitants are safe but imprisoned and House-Bound. COVID SHRUNK represents a world, which is perfect but restricted and claustrophobic. “No exterior contact allowed so all totally house-bound.” The garden is celebrated in LOCKED-IN HOUSE, but outside the pandemic is raging and so the walls seem to imprison the inhabitants. THE COVID SIX shows a house hanging precariously with its roof gaping and six faces atop skeleton bodies. The outside-in box/house shows Jenny’s skilfully drawn household items including a table laid for a tea-time feast. Despite this the people seem to have wasted away. We need more than food to thrive. COVID-FREE ENTRANCE is amusingly topped with a roof made of two puffed up covid masks with chimney pots giving the appearance of breasts. Inside is a full-on life of a dolls house. As it indicates in the title, THE TIED HOUSE is tied shut with string and threads and constricted. Does the house have breathing difficulties – a symptom of Covid? It certainly looks uninhabitable. Finally, THE TREE HOUSE appears to be different - a demonstration of the power of nature to take over buildings within a short space of time. A tree grows through the roof and roots dangle below. The tree is more prominent than the house. Humanity has less power than we sometimes think. The set of six boxes are memorable, eyecatching and have a unique vision. 

Jenny Kallin’s HOUSE-BOUND COLLAGES NUMBERS 1 AND 2 These collages use words and images from old magazines to show how women were browbeaten into buying gadgets and shown a ‘glamourous’ life at home. Being House-Bound was promoted to discourage women from seeking careers outside the home, and from gaining equality with men. They are an interesting reflection on how we are still being cajoled into buying domestic stuff for the home to keep us house bound. No.2 pictured. 

Karen Simpson’s work IT ALL COMES OUT IN THE WASH is a potent photogram installation behind a grill. “Wildfires, flash floods, hurricanes, the fragility of life, our lives, houses, possessions gone, swept away in seconds…”. Karen experiments with photograms of domestic objects onto paper that curls irrepressibly. The papers are multiple and one thinks of just how many objects we all have in our homes.

Terrible fires and floods can expose how vulnerable all these belongings are and how quickly our memorabilia, photos and treasured items can be lost to the forces of nature. It’s a stark reminder of our vulnerability to climate change. 

Karen’s second piece, VESTIGE presents as a hollowed-out brick wall. Looking closer, one sees the documents of lives; letters, bills, photos, birth or marriage certificates that accompany all lives papering the bricks and becoming parts of the walls of the home. It’s made of Papier mâché and is a strong piece, making me think of the marks of life on Rachel Whiteread’s ‘House’. “Traces of everyday life, the briefest of moments, like fossils, absorbed into the very fabric of a building, a house, a home…”.  Karen has produced two strong works that make us think about the importance of home as shelter and keeper of memories, also about the vulnerability of the house to time and extremes of nature. 

Veronica Tonge shows two different works based on dolls houses. THE WAITING ROOM seems to be a one room doll’s house, like no other, where two grey people sit centrally. They are in position so that they aren’t touching, seeming isolated from each other and the outside world. Mirror squares reflect light upwards in strange patterns. The work is unsettling and strongly evokes the lockdown period of the pandemic. Veronica states that “This artwork is a representation of how we felt whilst self-isolating.” Newly moved to Herne Bay, without support around them, she and her husband endured a very difficult self-isolation. The work is entirely grey inside which increases the feeling of constriction and unreality. It’s an emotionally and visually strong piece. 

Veronica’s second work is COTTAGE CULTURE, a large weatherboarded cottage with outhouse. “This cottage (a work in progress) dates from the 1870s. In one half a ghostly couple still invisibly inhabit it, living a just post WW2 mean existence. 150 years later, done up, their cottage becomes a romantic, cosy, imaginary experience of a Victorian ‘staycation’.” Time damaged roof tiles and weatherboarding are painstakingly worked from cut up lolly sticks, with an intricate interior; we can see inside to the original old-fashioned and uncomfortable side. Next door, updated furnishing reflects a slightly different way of life. An outside toilet, actually an earth closet, and basic kitchen show how life was far from ideal years ago. We are often ‘sold’ an idealised way of country life, but it was normally a tough existence and one was usually house and garden-bound due to lack of money and opportunities. It’s a thought-provoking work. 

All six artists worked on this project over the two years, intermittently and with postponements that were disruptive and upsetting. Our bond over this pandemic time, maintained by Zoom meetings, perhaps helped to keep us happier and more focussed on creativity rather than being locked in and feeling forever isolated and house bound. 

all text and images by and © Jenny Fairweather 6.11.2021