My show Hard-on for Homewares opens next weekend. I'm excited. And I'm getting nervous.
This show is about admitting my yearning and desires, for home, for comfort, for security.
I do find it hard to speak candidly about things so personal to me - those nearest to me will attest to how close I play these things to my chest, and looking at the finished works I can see this emotional secrecy, and see it slowly fade.
An ascending level of intimacy has emerged in the work as I slowly unlocked my hard-on for homewares* (*the desire and excitement for possessions relating to the home).
Keys and Locks feature heavily in the show, it's an obvious metaphor I suppose, but to me they speak on one level about things hidden, thoughts and feeling guarded and not shared and on another level, a more tangible level, they speak of security and belonging. If you have keys, you have somewhere you can go, somewhere you belong, somewhere you can lock yourself in to feel safe. And that's what this desire has been, a fantasy locked safely away from the cold winter of reality.
But as some of these desires, these wishes, have come to fruition -I have recently bought my first house, and filled it with gorgeous things- and it's given me a newly found sense of home and security that I'd only ever dreamt of, it has also made me realise that these desires run deeper than physical possessions, because something is still seemingly missing. I guess when all is said and done, that's really what the show is about. What deep-desires do these conscious-desires signify?
Maybe the perpetual nature of desire itself?
But enough of my riddling.
The show opens at Stockroom, 98 Piper Street Kyneton, Saturday 13 July, 4:30-7pm.
Also showing is Pia Jonhson who also explores concepts of belonging, aloneness and identity through a series of self portraits in her show Finding Yourself at Home Alone. Using the home as a place of reflection, Jonhson portrays the intensity of personal experience within our most intimate of environments.
Props to Stockroom for curating our shows together by the way.
