HOMESWEETHOME INSTALLATION, 2016

Timber framed canvas house 230x150x60cm
Silhouette plywood figures life size
Relics found plastic

1 in every 122 people in the world are displaced (2014 UNHCR Report)

There were 367 children in immigration detention seeking asylum in Australia as of April 2016 (Asylum Seeker Resource Centre)

“The shrinking of imaginative identification which allows such things as shared humanity to be forgotten always begins at home” (Robinson 2012, 31) (Imagining…P16)

Home is a ‘spatial imaginary’ to which we attach feelings of both refuge and danger. It includes in its meaning an idea of where we can safely settle and daydream, but also an idea of exclusion. It encompasses the gamut of what it means to be human. The installation homesweethome looks at the notion of home in the light of global displacement and the local detention of refugees and asks us to look at our human responses to crisis.

We use the idea of home as in Alison and Dowling's 'Spatial imaginary': as overlapping physical and emotional contexts. The notion of home also sets in tension the domestic and outside worlds, us and them.

The installation Dorothy’s House explores the imagery of Dorothy's home being swept away by a tornado in Kansas, from Salman Rushdie’s notion of the film The Wizard of Oz as an archetypal moving home story.

The installation We are all Strangers brings to mind both the ideas of asking for help and extending a hand, particularly in light of refugees in Australia's off-shore detention centres.

Relics explores the notion of people losing their home due to natural disaster, war, or civil unrest, and then having to seek refuge.

Gallery Images - David Roche

Solo Exhibition - Home Sweet Home, Chrissie Cotter Gallery 2016
Finalist - Harbour Sculpture 2017
Finalist - Sculptures at Scenic World 2018