Was it this house or another similar looking house?
thisHOUSE? is an installation comprising a series of paintings, photographs, and assemblage made in response to an historic crime scene. It is an attempt to re- remember 'the house' of a crime; a house which has stalked dreams and waking moments. thisHOUSE? is an icon that mutates and shifts forms, embellishing the experience of personal violation and lost innocence. It's a spectre that endures within a maelstrom of consciousness and dreamscapes.
The work is a memorial narrative of how trauma and pain has lived within a survivor. Using paint, mixed media and decorative motifs, thisHOUSE? signifies the idea, that a crime, once experienced in a bucolic Sussex village, doesn't define you but shapes you. The installation invites the viewer to inhabit thisHOUSE?, to probe and celebrate survival.
Veronica Slater
thisHOUSE?
If décor is the skin of a house, Veronica Slater's new series thisHOUSE? peels it back to go beneath to the bricks and mortar of what we house and what houses us. If the house is the self, what happens when the house is broken into and that core image of refuge perturbed? Slater's paintings play out the dichotomies of pattern and place, of the ideal and its fracture in powerful works that also resonate with themes of artifice and nature, of the synthetic and the organic. The line between what is remembered and what supressed is crossed and re-crossed through the gestures of painting, that move nimbly between representation and abstraction, suggesting, as Gaston Bachelard argues, that, 'Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are "housed". Our soul is an abode. And by remembering "houses" and "rooms", we learn to abide within ourselves. Now everything becomes the house in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them.' (1) The image of the house finally tumbles and spins, until it floats beyond the civilising and containing elements of the decorative into a pixelated universe of dreamy resolution.
Dr Cherry Smyth
(1) Gaston Bachelard, (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, p.xxxvii
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thisHOUSE?
Paint, mixed media and decorative motiffs
2019
images
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