Trancendental Housework

Furniture usually just lingers about, not taking up too much of our attention or emotional energy. But sometimes the opposite can be true. In the front rooms of working class Britain women made shrines to modernity, a modern life free from the constraints of either an industrial or a domestic obligation. Here objects take on an almost sacred significance, reminiscent of the relics of religion. Curiosities and mementos are fetishized as in the home shrines of popular folk culture, nostalgia and the ambiguities of consumer culture on private display. The domestic objects and household ornaments of our childhoods take on an emotional value that shape our notions of self; that construct significant personal identities. In the body of work Transcendental Housework, I subvert these domestic objects that haunt our retrogressive imagination. This is dysfunctional furniture and ambivalent ornamentation. Sculptural objects, both floor based and wall based seem to lurk or loiter in the gallery space, they have a whiff of discontented anthropomorphism.