Of no fixed abode - installation continued

Sorry if this is too many photos - better than too many words I feel.


The completed installation



Taken from inside looking out



boxes gallore - literally












Until today - drama struck! I went to the gallery to meet some school children to talk to them about my artwork, to find that the back wall had collapsed. I think I kept cool quite well, but I think it's fair to say I'm a little bit gutted.






No time to fix it now... but more than that, it seems to make sense to me. Here is the text I wrote, this afternoon, after finding it this morning:

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The back wall of the installation where the artist has constructed a house from the wrappings of cardboard boxes has begun to collapse. The artist has allowed and embraced this as a natural progression of the installation.

The artwork began as an attempt to literally construct a house out of her experiences of constantly moving between houses; the hollow boxes acting as ghost-like echoes of each time the artist has moved house.

The collapsed back wall is a poignant reminder of just how fragile Hughes’ experience of home has been. It reflects a familiar struggle for the artist in trying to rebuild and reclaim lost homes.

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Of no fixed abode

I ended up showing 6 different artworks in the show.

The most dominating was a large scale installation. Here are some pics of it from beginning to end (I need to dig out the drawings from when we were planning it too - they could be interesting).


This is the model I produced to run the proposal by the gallery and to help me visualise my idea. If I'd known how long the real thing was going to take, I would have spent less time on this model!





I thought I was doing well with production at this stage...how little I knew!


Wrapping boxes! A time consuming activity, so I discovered.






Getting this far took me to Saturday evening. The gallery was shut Sunday and Monday, and I was working in the mornings Tuesday and Wed and Thurs - which essentially left me with 3 afternoons to complete the installation. And so box making began in ernest, every hour or every day for the week that followed.

I would literally have not finished it without the help of friends, like Chris Sharpe, Jon Tan, Bob Wallington, my brother malcolm, YPF (the church youth group, more about that later) and of course, my boyfriend Mike Green.

For the best part of a week I literally missed I think every lunch, working straight through...


By wednesday night (less than 24 hours before the opening of the exhibtion)... I was still short boxes. That's when Wallo (youth group leader) and YPF (church youthgroup) came to my rescue like multiple nights in shining armour.

I'll have to get a pic from one of the lads - but what a heart warming sight: For an hour and a half on Wed evening, the youth group 'made boxes' for me. 41 they produced I think - and it turned out to be EXACTLY the number I was lacking. A good story... I feel.

Of no fixed abode

What a journey is has been, preparing for my first solo show. I hardly know where to begin. I didn't want to put pics up etc before the exhibition opened because it's easy to become de-sensitized i think but the counter side of that is that now there is a lot to tell.



First, here is the press release from the exhibition.



For most of us our notions of home are of the secure, fixed sanctuary that acts as the base for our everyday lives, both physically and emotionally. We often have a clear image of its function, which extends to its construction: the memorable intricacies and peculiar facts about the physical building. Do we take home for granted? What if it wasn’t so permanent?

‘Of no fixed abode’ presents a selection of work by artist Fiona Hughes, who has been artist-in-residence at the Royal Masonic School for Girls, Rickmansworth. With that coming to an end in August, this exhibition acts as a conclusion to her two year working residency. Rather than each work existing independently, ‘Of no fixed abode’ shows them working together as an exchange of ideas or shades of the same story. Divided into three areas, the first and largest greets us with a line of tiny wax bricks. Hollow and individually handmade, each brick is fragile and susceptible. They draw a fragmented landscape (we only see parts of buildings, nothing complete or whole) that is so familiar it could be anywhere but in that skyline. The lines echo those of the sketches of abandoned buildings, drawn with tape. Cardboard castings of bricks build the corner of an unseen room, and castings of the inside of boxes themselves lay out the beginnings of a floor plan of another. Perhaps the most dominating aspect to the room is the facade of a brown paper boxes. Here, Hughes has constructed an adult-sized Wendy house within the gallery from the same materials that we pack up our homes into when the time comes to move on. The empty, simplified boxes of different shapes and sizes become the very bricks that build the notional stability of the home. But instead of being comforting and secure, the walls feel strangely oppressive and at the same time temporary. In the last space sits a series of houses, partly constructed/destroyed. One fits within the next, describing a sequence of homes, each built upon the previous.

Hughes’ life has been a series of moves. Although born in the UK, at six weeks old her family flew back to Indonesia where her parents had been up until the birth. Her biography traces frequent moves between villages and towns, between Indonesia and the UK. Significantly at the age of 13 her family were evacuated from their town due to an outbreak of war; their then home was burnt down in the fighting. Now living and working in the UK, Hughes has been deeply influenced by her unconventional ideas about home. For her the experience of home has usually been temporary, a times constantly living out of boxes, where the boxes become more of at home than the building that they are in.

Tim Stock, 2010

Bath - Here today gone tomorrow

Here is an image of my work in exhibition Here Today Gone Tomorrow as part of Bath's Fringe Art festival. The exhibition was dismantled today and tomorrow I'm getting a train to Bath to collect the work.

I was really pleased with the exhibition - full of really interesting work.

An artwork by Michael Coombe stood out to me... I'm going to follow up getting in touch with him.