Research task - Creating an imaginary exhibition

Exhibition title and explanation.

What does home mean anyway?

Asking this open ended question elicits an often surprising variety of responses. Some are familiar, some shocking and some just make you think more. The AI tool ChatGPT does a pretty good job of aggregating these answers and the result greets you as you enter the room.

What does home mean is a particularly relevant question to us all now in a world forever changed as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic.

Our home became our place of safety, confinement, work space, school, home bakery and craft station. It became our everything. Perhaps that is still the case. The world of work has certainly changed with more people electing or being forced to work from home. Businesses set up as an experiment with nothing else to fill time became successes and home schooling remained a way of life.

No more an empty space between 8 am and 6 pm, our homes purpose and significance in our lives changed forever. Small spaces worked fine to eat and sleep in but not for long hours of confinement. Outdoor space was craved even if that was just a balcony or communal space.

Over the years, the home has not escaped the artists attention either. In this exhibition we view home through the eyes of artists and writers over the last 200 years. For them home is the area they live now, where they were perhaps brought up, the house they live in, the things within it or the people who congregate there. Home is all those things and more .

For me, home is a tough one to pin down and maybe the motive for exploring the question at times in my own work and in this exhibition. I have moved maybe 15 times, lots more than some, less that others. Home now feels settled. We bought a flat two years ago and spent 12 months fully refurbishing it from a tired and unloved space into a warm and comfortable space with everything we need - including Dolly the dog.

So as you leave today, think some more about the question 'What does home mean to you?'

Exhibition walls.

Five walls in total - one leading you in with a monoprint overlaid with a definition of home by ChatGPT then four further walls in a square room displaying work.

(C) Leggy Gordon. ChatGPT

(C) Zöe Barker / Mick Buston / David Gentleman

Zöe Barker inspired me to work in this way and she was in turn inspired by David Gentleman. I think Barker's work is much tighter than mine and in this case, Gentleman's looser and I am somewhere in the middle but probably leaning more towards Gentleman.

(C) Florence Hutchings / Edward Bawden / Pierre Bonard

A lot of Hutchings work is about day to day instances and environments and she lists Bonard as one of her inspirations. In terms of fitting together as a trio, I have added Bawden who spent much time drawing his home, and cat, after moving as a widower to a new home later in life.

(C) Haley Tippmann / Luis Mendo

Both these artists produce a lot of work digitally on the iPad and fit together as a result. But they have also both reflected changes in home use. Tippmann's piece is titled "Working from Home' and Mendo created a series of self devised magazine covers in the image of The New Yorker Magazine during lockdown which the title references.

(C) David Grant Jr / Robert William Service / Naguib Mahfouz

Maybe straying from the brief but over the last couple of months I came across lots of written definitions and explanations of home - some humoures, some though provoking so decided to include them here.

Contenders to be included that didn't make the cut.

Floorplan

When we recently bought our home, the original floorplan was included. However felt this was too specific to my home rather than the general question of home itself.

Sergio Larrain spent years in Valparaisso photographing its people and its streets and published a book of the same name. However I felt it was a stretch to shoehorn photography in as well. On reflection, maybe I could / should have. The exhibition is about home and what that means, not drawings of home. Might have missed a trick here.

(C) L.S Lowry

Really wanted to include Lowry, his work is a key inspiration to me and he fits nicely alongside Zöe Barker and David Gentleman in terms of appearance but even though lots of his work was done in and around where he lived, wasn't sure if I was stretching it.

(C) George Butler

Again a key influence for me, George Butler is best known as an illustrator working in conflict areas. Amongst that is the destruction of towns, cities and peoples homes but didn't have anybody else's work I could find that would warrant a section on homelessness but something I think should be considered as integral to an exhibition like this as locally, nationally and internationally we are seeing more and more people displaced.