Within and Without: A Show About ‘Home’

I was recently invited by artist and curator, Emily Stevens, to take part in an exhibition exploring the theme ‘Home’. I made all new work for this show, which featured many of the graduates from the Royal College of Art’s MA painting programme. Here, I delve into the ideas behind this body of work.

KEOMA, oil on Arches Huile paper, 130x150cm, 2022

I’m standing in a rich violet-brown nothingness and all around me are orbs of colour. They are bodies of energy in my life. Some are blinding, glaring, powerful and vivid; front of awareness. Some are muted. Those deeper coloured ones are biding their time. Or they’ve been asked to recede. For the first time, I can identify as the being standing in the middle of them all. We are shining together. Each orb of coloured light is carefully sized and hovering about me. The glow they make is the place we overlap, belong to each other. Sometimes that’s ok. Sometimes I want to draw a line around them and watch the velvety murk fill the space in between us. All is in perfect balance. It is music. It is infinity. 

‘Home’ feels like one of those concepts that can be unendingly complex, ultimately simple and everything in between. Pick an element of home and watch your mind cycle from the very mundane to the psychologically challenging, to the universal depth and breadth of the subject and back to the ‘ugh, life’ position. Or perhaps that’s just me. In this body of paintings, I have tried to draw from the deepest reality of home. For me, home is a concept that remains robust despite any form of upbringing, family context or personal strife. Somehow, however loaded the term ‘home’ becomes, we can relate to it as an idea or a feeling beyond whatever we have survived.

Think of it like a moment when you are at home (current or childhood) and you are surrounded by family, yet you have a feeling of homesickness in your tummy. As though even at home, you are longing to go home. What is that about? Or as an adult, when you have created your own family and built a home together and everyone is inside and the front door is shut and yet you are still striving for it to be more. ‘How can we make this feel more like home?’ you might wonder.

Are we looking to find home in other people? Is that the great quest of romantic love? To find your ‘other half’ with whom you can feel entirely known and loved and complete. Would that answer the need for home? Or are you then met with a desire to have children to bring into this world and into the arms of your family to share with them your answer to the question of ‘where is home?’ 

I think the conflict within the concept of home is in the notion of permanence. Is home really a bedrock that never shifts? Are we satisfied that whatever life throws at us externally, there will be a place of comfort and care, anchored to one spot and all we have to do is walk through the metaphorical front door and kick off our shoes to experience it? 

I’m not talking about home as bricks and rooms, I’m examining it as a network of relations and the deeper yearning that may exist beyond those familial bonds. In that sense, we have to allow for flexibility in our idea of home, as each person journeys out and back in a fluid process of venturing away and returning to the fold. Can home accommodate growth and forgiveness or does it cling to a fixed format for its survival?

Although home takes all of these forms and more, ultimately for me, I think it is an inner experience. From feeling at home in oneself, we can then invite others in, or if reciprocal, share in their inner spaces. This doesn’t feel straightforward, because the self is not always a boundaried place and I for one can often find it populated by other voices or influence. But when I can really ‘centre down’ and connect to something eternal - beyond the life that I have entered (and will leave) alone - there is a source of comfort and a sense of feeling held. It is enough to enter relationships with and to build connections from. Let’s call it love. Love, which in itself is an act of faith.

Home then, is at once personal and relational, loving and fraught. A source of comfort and discomfort to varying degrees. But in my mind, each of these contradictory objects are the elements that orbit us, bound in the end by connections that are the fibres of love, held in place by the root of faith: the birthplace of home.