Home: My mother was born in a bucket (2014)
Along with seventeen other artists, in 2014 I was commissioned by the homelessness charity Crisis to make a new piece. These works then formed an exhibition and subsequent auction at Christie's, to raise awareness and funds for their campaign to help single homeless people in the UK.
For The Crisis Commission, each artist was tasked with creating work inspired by 'home'. This I found a hugely daunting task, not least because the idea of 'home' is so vast and amorphous, while being so very very important to all of us. Not everyone has a positive notion of home, for some it is a place to run away from, whereas for others it is a haven of safety. Making something which spoke to the complexity involved and also reflected the conflicting emotions bound up in 'home' was a great challenge. I talk a bit about the project here.
And yes, my mother really was born in a bucket.
The letter on the table, written by my close friend, reads:
The still point of a turning world
Where you can always come back to
Where there's no place like (click, click)
Kansas, Toto
Heart
The hearth you cannot get closer to,
Where there's always room for one more
hot bread
scones
the syncopated tick of a grand father clock
tick TOCK tick TOCK
smell of books unopened for fifty years
honey in the loft and the crackle of dead bees wings underfoot
fir resin
trickle of water over rock
a time of tweed and button boots two world wars ago
India
Photo albums
Paintings of unknown places and complete strangers
Lawnmower
A drawer full of single gloves clothes bought by a stranger with your name
- and six inches less around the waist
the past
an empty chair
the wind
kin