Objects_Home:Now_and_Then

Home: Now and Then was commissioned by the Senior Citizen’s Home Delfshoven commission for “art in the public space” was my apprenticeship during my BFA. Since their entire entrance hall was being renovated, in order to further give attention to the new environment, they chose two prominent walls in that space and decided to have a ceramics piece on each of them. One wall is at ground-level, measuring 600cm in length and 220 in height and is the background for the main sitting social area for the inhabitants and visitors, while the bottom of the second wall started at 220cm above the ground, and extended 800cm in length, and another 220cm in height.

BRIEFING AND PROPOSAL

The piece should be symbolic, but without using any specific symbolism at all (religious or otherwise) since the inhabitants of the home and the visitors come from all sorts of different back-grounds; it should be easily recognizable from a distance, but it should not be so obvious as to becoming boring soon – it should be detailed enough so that it could be re-discovered anew when given closer inspection and attention; it should be colourful and cheerful, but without being visually too intrusive.

The question of enriching daily life through seemingly banal objects was the pivotal point of my work in 2004; therefore the chance to exercise it on such a bigger scale seemed like a natural and welcome development. My interpretation of the briefing was that it was actually about the concept of The Home. This could be explored and expressed in many layers: Delfshove is the new home for many people who come from their own individual homes. Almost by definition it is virtually impossible to create a new home for many people - you can create a space where they can live and be taken care of, but it’s questionable whether it is possible to create a home for other people. So there were the ideas of the home that people come from, and the idea of the new home that they were now living in. Then there was the idea of making the entrance hall “more homely” for the visitors as well as the inhabitants, so a third idea of the home comes in.

My proposal was therefore to create a sculpture which could address the reality of the institutionalized Senior Citizens’ Home while at the same time re-introducing the aspects of an archetypal, “familiar” home. Although this feeling and idea of Home of course varies from person to person, a common element might be its memory - a memory so real that is almost palpable. The visualiztion of this concept was literally making a new home of ceramics which serves as bridge between the present reality of Delfshove while relating back to the impossibility to retrieve the original home.

In the bottom wall a 2-dimensional scene is depicted of a normal living-room (like the memory of home, which you cannot inhabit), which gradually extends into space becoming a real living-room (which you can indeed touch and live in). This living-room serves both as a memory of the past and as a reminder of life in the present. As the (2-dimensional) scene extends into the "real" living space, it slowly becomes functional (and 3-dimensional): the chair can be sat on, the vase can carry flowers, the reading lamp can be turned on, the picture frame can be filled with a picture of a loved one, the mirror dutifully reflects life as it is. In this sense the work is interactive: it doesn't just sit quietly in the corner but invites people to enhance their daily experience of sitting, for example, by participating in this living-room which is both real and imaginary.

It is in this interaction that the feeling of Home can be created: as in your own home, you change the flowers, you water the plants, and notice when you need new cushions because the old ones look a bit faded…

On the upper wall is the imaginary exterior (the façade), of the house that the living-room in the bottom wall belongs to. For this purpose, the already-existing brickwork is used as part of the image, thus further fusing the sculpture with the rest of the interior into one. The frames of two windows are made completely out of ceramics, in front of which two ceramic flower pots are placed with live-flowers, suggesting a very common, archetypal façade. But all there is to be seen in the interior of the window frames are the same brick wall surrounding them! This might seem an image of a boarded-up old home, closed and belonging to the past. Or it might precisely put the real and existing brick wall of the Delfshove home back into prime focus, as a reminder of the importance of the present.

CONCLUSIONS

One of the most important discoveries made while working on this commission was the power of structural elements. It was of prime importance to integrate the sculpture of the archetypal home into the institutionalized home to the extent that the sculpture gave the feeling that it was “coming out of the wall” of the building, that it was just but one more element of this room, rather than an alien piece of art randomly placed in this environment. In order to achieve this, the structure of the building itself was used as the determining factor which would shape the sculpture.

All of the surrounding wall-surfaces, floor and ceiling are made of bricks and tiles. This determined that the sculpture would also use the tile-structure as its own, in order to blend in with the rest of the environment. One of the biggest challenges arising when making large-scale ceramics is the question of where and how to cut the piece into manageable parts. Disliking random cuts in an image which is actually meant to be seen as whole (the living-room), the decision to utilize the tile structure in order to integrate the piece in the environment also served the purpose of giving a meaning to the decision of where and how to cut the ceramic sculpture into pieces: it became a tiled-wall.

On the bottom part, the result is a normal tiled-wall from which a full-blown, functional ceramic living-room protrudes. In this way, the 3-dimensional sculpted ceramic living-room objects are integrated into the 2-dimensional ceramic self-made tiles, which are integrated into the existing walls of the surrounding space. On the upper wall, the result is that the ceramic window frames transform a normal, existing brick-wall into both a representation of a brick wall of an imaginary home, while at the same time inviting the viewer to re-focus and again notice just the plain structural brick wall of Delfshove in front of him.

The colour and glaze are also very significant factors in integrating the piece into the environment, and in creating a connection between the separate elements composing it. First, a special lime-green-yellow coloured pigment was applied to the raised decorative elements in the objects of the sculpture in a way that it was “absorbed” by the clay, and seemed to colour the object from within it, rather than looking like a layer applied on top. Then a very smooth and pleasant to the touch, warm off-white glaze was applied to cover the piece entirely, partially concealing and partially revealing the coloured decoration underneath it.

The result is that the decorative elements are highlighted by the pigment and can be appreciated by close inspection, but the off-white colour integrates the separate objects into a unified whole, which makes it more visually coherent, especially at a distance. The combination of a block of neutral colour together with the slight variation in the off-white colour also mirrors the surrounding brick surfaces, which are also coloured by neutral, warm colours with slight variations in tone. 2004