Dwelling and disruption: How art and DIY practices can reconfigure domestic spaces to reveal new meanings of everyday life

ABSTRACT

Dwelling and Disruption: How Art and DIY Practices Can Reconfigure Domestic Spaces to Reveal New Meanings of Everyday Life

Dedicated to Simon Adams, AKA Paul Ritter (1966 - 2021)

This practice-based PhD explores how art practice and Do It Yourself (DIY) methods can temporally disturb the material surfaces of everyday life to allow new readings of the nature of home to unfold.

Central to this work are investigations into how the development of the dimensions of reach, touch, vibration/sound and folding as embodied practice research methods, can provide new means of connection between the 'opaque interiority of the body and the exteriority of the world' (Pallasmaa 2012).

My research investigation involves an ongoing series of physical interventions into the fabric of my house. This has produced an ongoing, interconnected stream of artworks from 2014 to 2025. Due to their temporary nature, I think of the artworks as a series of "visitors" to my house. Visitors that are accommodated and tolerated during their stay.

The essentially site-based and ephemeral nature of the practice means that the main body of the work exists in recorded form. This consists of over 90 artworks, documented through still images, videos and audio and including moving, site specific and durational works, together with the parallel text based and audio work of Brenchley. All the work is accessible via my website and relevant links.

Together with artworks made for and situated in my house, several pieces have left home in different forms to be presented in galleries, museums, outdoor spaces, and festivals. These include sound and object installations for Art in Romney Marsh in 2014, The Symposium for Acoustic Ecology at Chatham Dockyard in 2014 , Curious, South Norwood London in 2014 and 2015, Portability: Art Moves, at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2014 & 2015 Portability: Art Moves at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2014, Uncommon Chemistry at the Observer Building in Hastings 2017, Installation in Gulbenkian Theatre Canterbury in 2017, work and talk as part of Sticky Thick for the Whitstable Biennale in 2017, Installation and paper delivered at Goldsmiths University, London 2017, Paper delivered for Large Objects Moving Air as part of Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice at the London College of Communication in 2018 and work exhibited at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate in 2021 and 22 and at Hantverk & Found gallery in Margate in 2018.

My research considers the body of the house as a material extension of our own bodies, with dust as a central motif, medium and shared material. Through practice, the research explores the premise that the domestic spaces of home are emotionally and materially charged through habitation. Metaphorically, the envelope of the house, in its plasticity, folds around us as we live, constantly adjusting, stretching and refolding through habitation and the ongoing spatial fluidity of the quotidian.

This research project reaches back to my own childhood, extending out through my children, and reflecting on the gradual dismantling of my father's psyche through Alzheimer's dementia. My practice-based interventions explore how the constant folding and unfolding of our bodies and senses respond to the spaces and objects around us. Our own skin including our eyes, folding with the folds of space. DIY (do it yourself) and making good, processes by which the home is constantly being remade, form an ongoing process of material analysis and investigation, becoming an essential research method in this project.

The innate and compulsive trait of my Double Deficit Dyslexia (DDD), in feeling, finding and making new connections between seemingly disparate elements in everything I experience, is critical in shaping the conceptual underpinning, structure and form of my research process, thesis, art practice and methodology. This capacity opens up new possibilities for a material, conceptual and sensorial examination of the nature of home.