art – We need new stories…

A scone-fuelled mission

14th Nov 2025Posted in Blog posts, Field notesTagged art, artwork, Augustus Leopold Egg, Chris Ofili, George Elgar Hicks, Homes, Luke Fildes, painting, Sunil Gupta, Tate Britain, Walter SickertLeave a comment

It’s fun to have a mission.

I’ve been to the Tate Britain many times before but this was the first time I had a mission – I was looking for artworks that had representations of home in them.

Often I wander around museums and don’t really feel like I’m engaging with them. I did a short ethnography course a million years ago and the activity I undertook was watching others interacting with an artwork. Sitting there for an afternoon I felt quite exposed because, although I’d picked a quite well known and large piece of art to watch the watchers, most people passed it by very quickly indeed. My sitting there for so long felt very out of place compared to how long others were interacting with the artwork.

As someone who’s never learned ‘how to’ interpret art, I don’t feel like I come to it with a very wide vocabulary to understand what I’m seeing. That’s partly why I’m so interested in including reviewing different cultural materials in my PhD – it’s a way for me to learn some skills and approaches to understanding and interrogating artwork.

I love going to museums and galleries and enjoy exploring, so being able to get more ways to understand pieces of art and find ways to interact with them in a more meaningful way feels like such an enriching thing to be able to do. The fact that it’s in the service of something that feels useful in terms of answering the questions of my wider PhD then means I can allow myself to enjoy it without the more puritanical streak in me freaking out.

I also got to have some delicious tea and a lovely scone with an absolutely stonking amount of clotted cream and jam to refresh me part-way through the endeavour. If anyone had told me this is what working on the weekend could be like I think past me would find it as hard as current me to fathom this could be the case.

In that context then, I really enjoyed having that sense of purpose – being able to make my way around the exhibition with a hook to see what I could find. I also passed on my mission to the posse I was with which added to the fun, for me at least – I didn’t do a feedback poll to see how the others felt about it.

I had expected to be able to find more things along the way than I did though. Lots of pieces either didn’t seem to relate to the home or didn’t show people in that context.

Here are a few of the ones I did find along the way.

A fascinating piece, with such a story within it of the relationship between the two people. Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about Sickert, and particularly this piece, as a response. Albeit Woolf was writing in response to another version of the painting done by Sickert and held at the Ashmolean Museum – that one has much more vibrant colours and decor but the people within it are unchanged. Stuck and bored whatever their surroundings.

That sense of a story in the paintings comes through much more strongly in those pieces where there are multiple people in. From a Dr looking after a sick child, to men distraught – sometimes supported by their wife as in Hick’s work, at other times, as in Egg’s the prostrate woman is apparently the cause. Of course that also makes it harder to see the interiors though…

Woolf makes another appearance in the home of one couple in Gupta’s series showing homosexual couples at home. The photos were taken at a time in the 1980s when homosexuality was being portrayed as deviant whilst these photos present them as ordinary rather than other.

All of the paintings have a story to tell but from this collection of paintings at least, it’s a gentler story in those with just one person in. Peace, quiet and reflection in the scenes but, apart from McEvoy’s painting the interiors themselves are vibrant and busy – full of colour and objects.

Mary McEvoy, *Interior: Girl reading*, 1901

More wandering and exploring, a beautiful richly coloured and empty view of the room where Shakespeare was apparently born; a side-quest visit to see the Henry Moore’s because I can still enjoy the stark, sensual beauty of them whilst working hard.

Then, as we left the building, we were met by Chris Ofili’s colourful, elegiac piece in memory of those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire. A totally different piece. The scale monumental compared to the smaller pieces I’d seen. Richly coloured and far removed from the gentle, quiet reflections. As with some of the other pieces, telling a story about when things have gone wrong, failings and harm. This time, at a societal level rather than between two people. The painting itself has a dreamlike quality about a nightmarish situation.

Only a few pieces of art found on my visit but that small selection shows just how varied homes and home-making and un-making can be, how fundamental they are to our lives and wellbeing.

Walked the homes

8th Aug 202527th Oct 2025Posted in Blog posts, Field notesTagged art, do-ho-suh, exhibition, history, Home, memory, sculpture, tate-modern, travel, walk-the-house, writingLeave a comment

Do Ho Suh’s exhibition at the Tate is so titled because traditional Korean buildings known as a hanok can be disassembled and reassembled elsewhere, a process of ‘walking the house’.

It was wonderful to be immersed in someone expressing different aspects of the home. From the physical aspects to the emotional and temporal. Seeing them all overlaid together, as they are for people most of the time but which feels rare to see in artworks. Homes can often be featured in art but rarely as the main event, often just a backdrop or fleeting glimpse. Something that tells us about someone but isn’t often the main focus.

Public/private split

Homes are usually thought of as private spaces, or at least they have increasingly been for the last few hundred years. People lived together in much more communal set-ups. Sharing rooms, beds and homes. Things that we would now consider private, like using the toilet or having sex, were much more public activities then. It’s apparently why swear words were related to religion up until a few hundred years ago – that was a transgressive thing to talk about, whereas swear words now are more about sex and toilet things because they have become private matters, things to be ashamed or embarrassed about.

Here, Suh upends that, making the private public. He has houses within houses, parts of homes which have become public spaces as they are demolished. A childhood home rubbed down and rebuilt within the gallery. Every part of the exterior traced onto paper, lines and designs, to capture the look and feel of the place. Films showing homes exposed to the public as they are demolished, private walls becoming briefly public before they disappear.

Homes in this telling are not just becoming public because we get to see the private light switches and fire hydrants of previous homes but, in sharing his artistic response to his home, he’s also helping us move from the specific to the universal. In showing us where he’s lived in a way which invites us in, creates some intimacy, he’s also inviting people to think about their own home. Helping us bring our own homes into that gallery, comparing ours with his, reflecting back on our own, seeing how others live.

Gender and homes

Homes have traditionally become a place that’s associated with women rather than men, as many, including Bowlby, Gregory and McKie have reflected. Following the split between public and private spaces, men became more associated with public spaces and women with private spaces. Perhaps if the exhibition had been by a woman rather than a man, it might have resonated slightly differently. A sense of women working within the parameters they are typically afforded. Whereas having a man make art from it, and see it as something which is worthy of making art with and from, is another way of helping to show and shift that division.

Modernity and homes

Putnam identified two successive transformations of contemporary living from traditional 19th Century models of home. The first was the emergence of the modern home between about 1920-1950 when domestic spaces were designed around the technical core of sewers, water, gas and power cables. A time when these innovations were new for most people and somewhat astonishing, or perhaps a little terrifying too. The second shift he identifies is around the 1960s, when the technical, economic and political structures of modernity became part of the background of modern home life. At that point, as what he describes as ‘the material life supports of modernity are taken for granted’, the cables and sewers and suchlike fade into the background and the home becomes a space in which people personalise their space and negotiate with each other about how it looks.

In that context it was fun to see cables, wires and light fittings represented. Those life supports, especially things like cables, don’t tend to be shown and have disappeared into a sense of what normal homes look like. Often in lifestyle magazines cables and wires get edited out of pictures, as though the items they are powering magically work without showing the plugs. That it’s not cool or aspirational to need to connect in to power sockets.

Suh shows the different aspects of the home which would normally be hidden, peeling away layers of life. Simultaneously showing the modernity of the home which is taken for granted by those who have grown up with it, and also going back to the pre-modern home where it’s not taken for granted and is instead something to marvel at. Bringing them to the fore again allows for the magic and importance of them to be seen and recognised.

Making homes our own

When people move into a place they often try and remove traces of previous occupants to ‘make it their own’. Suh shows there are many ways to make a home our own. He had to get permission from some of the landlords to make the art, a way of taking ownership of the home – it’s his art when it’s out in the world, even if it wasn’t and isn’t ‘his’ home.

In one of the pieces, he layers up aspects of different homes – light switches and plugs, light fittings and door handles. It gave me a time-travelling sense of all of the people who would have used those light switches and door handles. The different hands that had used them, the lives they have supported. As we become more separate in our homes, with much less communal living, more people living by themselves, and even within homes as we have separate spaces, overlaying parts from multiple homes gave a more communal sense of home.

Memory and meaning

For some, home is a place of practices and habits, for others it’s a place that holds memory and meaning. The pieces by Suh blur those boundaries. The practice of making art, the holding on to places and details which act as anchors for both practices within the home and also memories.

The pieces are a way of preserving the past but also, for him as an artist, of making the future – exhibitions and work, building a body of work and meaning. Tracing the contours of the building, with his childhood home literally rubbing every part of the outside of the building, capturing the details on fabric which then gets remade into a simulacrum of his home – but not a place you could actually live within. A memory of the memory. A memory that looks like the memory, in the same way a story that gets told and retold can become a memory of the story, rather than a memory of the memory.

As Brickell reflects, home isn’t just a place where history ends up but where history emerges from and, quoting Caluya, the home exhibits ‘a certain plastic tendency that enables its boundaries to expand and shrink’. This work does that too, delicately and painstakingly tracing the boundaries of the homes but with an intention for those very boundaries to go further out into the world.

The exhibition space itself felt like things were quite crushed together and could have done with some more space to breathe. Nonetheless, providing room for people to see homes as worthy of being considered art, and not just glamorous homes or parts of homes but the life support parts, created a space for thinking about homes that we can take from the gallery into the world and back home again.

The RoI of paint

17th Jul 202527th Oct 2025Posted in Blog posts, PerspectivesTagged art, diy, home-improvement, painting, writingLeave a comment

Luring you in with my jargon chat there. Not here to talk about the French king of paint. RoI is what the cool kids use to talk about a return on investment.

In economics world, where we are rational actors, the talk is about return on investment. If an organisation or an individual invests £x, how long will it take them to see a return on that? Investing £x means maintenance or running costs will be x% lower and therefore you can calculate how long it will take to generate savings which add up to original investment. Aka your return on investment.

All sounds really straightforward and scientific. Hard crunchy numbers which are inarguable. Intentionally so I think. Constructing approaches which reinforce the impression that this is an objective approach in a world which seems to think objectivity is good thing. As Christie, Smith and Munro (2008) reflect, detachment, objectivity and scepticism are simply forms of emotion work which have been privileged within accounts of the scientific method, and I would argue more broadly too.

Yet how those numbers get developed, who is in control of defining what does or doesn’t weigh on the scales is also fundamental. In another lifetime I was trying to develop a project using the feed-in tariff – a governmental mechanism to provide an above-market price for renewable energy generated. When the feed-in tariff was first introduced the rates were really high, such that it would only take about 10 years to break even on the tariff, with another 15 years of income given the feed-in tariff lasted for 25 years. This was far and away a better deal than lots of other investment opportunities. It was so good that we didn’t even try to claim bill savings from the energy generated because there were a lot of variables in consumption patterns and we didn’t have sufficient confidence in the indicative numbers we generated.

It wasn’t our first rodeo doing this kind of project so we felt confident that we had covered the different elements to build up the cost profile that people would expect. Over time in discussion with senior decision makers, we were asked to add all kinds of costs in which were normally outside the scope of costs for this kind of decision. More and more costs got added on and the numbers that popped out the other end of the evaluation got worse and worse. We looked to offset this by adding in projected cost savings on energy but eventually the model broke. It became clear that they just didn’t want to do the project, so they kept going until the RoI looked so bad that people said there was no way they could support the project. They ‘weren’t sure’ about the technology but could turn it in to numbers that looked empirical, feel like they were doing their job properly and meant they didn’t need to engage with their lack of knowledge.

Yet there are many items we spend money on where even attempting that kind of calculation doesn’t make sense. Paint for instance. Or a vase. Maybe it’s easier with paint. We can at least try and make a guess at whether one kind of paint might last compared to a cheaper one. That’s not entirely straightforward though either. What does it mean for paint to last? Never gets any marks on it at all? To bounce back after marks have been attempted to get cleaned off? Or something more ephemeral – it lasts longer because we really like the colour and it fits with the place and how we want it to be? Continually works as we look to shift things around in terms of the look of the place?

We can do some research to get feedback on how long paint ‘lasts’ but is that a meaningful metric for how people actually make decisions? For many people, the premium for some paints like Farrow & Ball is worth it because of the vibe the paint has. It makes people feel they are buying some of that lifestyle which the relative difference in costs compared to cheaper paint allows, in a way the cost differential between their home and one more in keeping with the atmos isn’t.

Of course, paint is much cheaper than lots of other things people can do to their homes. So transformative as well. A tin of paint, a few hours and a totally different space. Hard to think of something which can make as much of a difference as quickly. In terms of bang for your beautifully coloured buck it scores highly. When people move into a new place there can often be talk about wanting to make the place their own (Cook, 2021). Paint is such a strong way to do that, literally getting attached to the place. The act and practice of making the place your home.

It’s therefore unsurprising that people will be prepared to spend a bit more on paint and might not think about the RoI, compared to more expensive things like heat pumps or solar PV. In both cases the question might be around whether they can afford it or not, it’s just that in the latter case the upfront cost is much higher and therefore it might not be possible to satisfy the want.

For many people, they’ve already got a heating system which works. Making the change to a heat pump or getting solar doesn’t solve a problem or give them an opportunity. It will make their home slightly differently warm. It might bring with it indeterminate concerns about running costs or how it works. It’s a lot of cost, in a world where choosing the heat pump or solar likely means choosing not to do lots of other things. Of course there are an increasing number of people for whom it isn’t a choice in the first place but for those who have enough in the bank or can borrow, it is a choice and one it can be hard to justify.

Of course we’re talking about costs which are orders of magnitude different but does that mean the thought processes which lead to the choice are totally different?

An uncomfortable silence

20th Jun 202527th Oct 2025Posted in Blog posts, Field notesTagged art, books, theatreLeave a comment

I went to see ‘London Road’ at The National Theatre, a musical using verbatim language from residents of and around London Road. 79 London Road was where the serial killer Steven Wright was living when he was arrested for the murders of five women.

The play doesn’t really focus on the murderer, and those who have been killed hardly feature at all, and rarely with much compassion. In one sequence, one of the women from the road talked about how they were glad the women were killed – they had all been working on the street or the local area as sex workers – and the person living on the road found it uncomfortable and unpleasant living there. There were a number of extended silences, giving the audience time to contemplate what she’s saying, to feel the messy, difficult implications of it. The silences increased the sense of intimacy, hearing private views that she knows she ‘shouldn’t’ be feeling, or we would probably want to hear. It felt like the audience was holding it’s breath as she spoke. Letting her say what she had to say. Curious about it. Wondering if she would pull back, come to more socially acceptable views. Instead the kept restating her views, going further each time, the pauses giving more of an impression they were considered views.

An even bigger silence later on, as one of the sex workers reflected on how the murders had made them get out of that work, mostly – they still saw a few regulars. A moment that seemed to grow and grow, perpetually it felt, about to end, yet somehow continuing to expand. Like blowing a bubble, the shape of it wobbling as it grows, so fragile and ready to pop at any moment, yet somehow, for that fraction of a second which feels bigger, continuing to exist and grow. A reminder of how powerfully a silence can hold people, how rare it can be. Discomfort and waves of wondering when it will end, a tension at times that feels like it needs to end and then shifts into a wanting it to continue – it’s so big but surely we can make it ever bigger and larger. At times almost wanting to laugh because it felt so long, improbably so.

Moments of silence can be hard to experience, whether they are gentle ones like those in a safe, lovely theatre, or harder ones with other people where the stakes are high. Not knowing, filling it with our own dread panic. The voices of our insecurity, where it’s hard to be curious, there’s more risk in the response.

More and more there’s discussion about how smart phones and screen time generally are affecting our ability to sit with discomfort or boredom. Leaving us rushing to fill the silent moment with distraction and action, noise and other people doing things. Not having to wait to see what becomes of the silence because we can fast forward or scroll on through other people’s lives and thoughts.

The play was a reminder of the messiness of emotions and reactions. Not tidying things up for people but giving the people represented in the play the dignity and responsibility of their own emotions. Providing the audience the space to feel their own responses, however uncomfortable they might find them. The power of holding some space and allowing things to be as they are.