HOME IS WHEREVER I’M WITH YOU
23 – 24 March 2019
Enclave Lab, 50 Resolution Way, Deptford, London SE8 4NT
A weekend exhibition that brings together video artist Dorothy Cheung, visual anthropologist Ching Wong, and art and learning practitioners Francesca Centioni Dene, Lynn Obath, Maria Samotrácia, Sarah Ward and Siuman Wu, focusing on questions of home, physical space, displacement, memory, individuality, and collectivity. Through tangible and intangible material practices, the artists use mixed media to articulate ‘home’ as a psychological space that holds memories, personal experience and a sense of security regardless of geographic location.
The exhibition includes embroidery, sculptures, photographs, moving images and installations that examine various conceptions of space and how people who have moved abroad inhabit and interact with that space. This can be one’s personal, physical space and how we relate to other people (the individual within the group or collective); one’s private domestic space (home); and finally the specificity of space in relation to geography (how individuals are influenced by culture).
This exhibition is part of WIP it good, an event programme curated by Goldsmiths MFA Curating students that will see artists from many different disciplines engage with the theme of work in progress.
Siuman Wu, A glass of water (2019), moving images
A three-panel projection displays a state of unstable stability with glasses of water. Stability is maintained by the tensions between the two sides, mimicking the current political state of the artist’s home city, Hong Kong, and its relationship with China.
Dorothy Cheung, Songs from Home (2018), film
A short film shows women who moved to Rotterdam singing in public spaces in their mother tongue as a means to temporarily occupy the space filmed. They picked places that reminded them of their home. This is a work-in-progress due to the public and random nature of the settings.
Francesca Centioni Dene, Saltwater (2017-2019), photographs
A series of instant images depicts the sea as an expansive space, offering a moment for one’s contemplation. Each instant image stands still, frozen in space and time. Fleeting moments become a lingering experience, a place to escape to and a home away from home.
Sarah Ward, Home [Land] (2019), installations
An interactive installation invites the audience to draw an imaginative border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. It presents the concept of home through the lens of place and placelessness. Home connects with belonging: belonging with identity; identity with place; place with location; location with land; and land with space. Through place naming we give meaning to space and through mapping we can locate place.
Ching Wong, Island #1,#2,#3 (2019), documentary
A three-channel video installation features the owners of Uncle Wrinkle, a Chinese restaurant in New Cross, which has been opened for over 20 years. The Hong Kong restaurateurs, who migrated to the United Kingdom in 1980s and 1990s, constructed their restaurant space as a ‘home’, where they cook and showcase their pottery works. They have gradually built up two more ‘homes’: Kwan's pottery studio and the place they live. The work is an ethnographic exploration of Kwan's creation and craftsmanship developed in the United Kingdom. It interrogates on stigmatic and conventional representation of migrants' lives and dives into their transforming perception of identity and social relationship through exploring the materiality within their lives.
Maria Samotrácia, Untitled (2019), sculptures
A series of latex sculptures explores feelings of displacement and ambivalence regarding the construct of ‘home’ as a welcoming and cozy space. Babies, usually associated with innocence and warmth, appear distressed as they emerge from a messy place only to face – as gracefully as they possibly can – an even messier reality.
Lynn Obath, Entangled (2019), embroidery
The work weaves together concepts of home through language and the delicate nature of communicating. Lines juxtaposed against knots consider the complexities of translation and comprehension.
Francesca Centioni Dene, Maria Samotrácia and Siuman Wu, Spread the Flower Power (2019), installation
Three artists together created a mixed-media installation as a collective response to the damaging environmental effects of gentrification, motivated by the campaign to save the Deptford community Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and Reginald House. As a reflection on the famous activist slogan ‘think globally, act locally’, the artists protest the destruction of the beloved garden and community hub by engaging in guerrilla gardening through making and locally spreading seed bombs. To encourage the largest possible number of people to get involved and leave a mark on their own streets – their home – the artists have created and circulate the DIY instructional video, how-to posters and freely handed out ready-to-throw ‘bombs’.