H O M E w a r d b o u n d: A Transient Public Art Installation, 2012

Funded by Gosford City Council’s Community and Cultural Development Grant, Co-ordinated by Youth Arts Warehouse and Regional Youth Support Services. Project Artist: Kiera O’Toole

Narara Air Strip, Narara, NSW, Australia

"Nil aon tinn tan mar la tinn tain fein" (There's no place like home).

The HOMEward bound project engages local communities in a dialogue that explores personal experiences of 'home'. Critical and imaginative inquiries form embodied ideologies that pertain to home through a process of collaboration, gifting individual a n d p e r s o n a l stories to the project. My intention is not to fashion sentimentality of 'home', but to reflect on the complexities of family, identity and community which is embodied in the lived experience of home. The sculptural installation as a concept explores this thematic, attached to the unfamiliar/familiar interior and exterior spaces that surround the generic make-up of home. Individual responses decode place through a visual re-imagining of an impression of home in linear cotton drawings.

The sculpture is transient in its placement, expressing the duplicitous nature of home and what it means to belong or not. The work in its physicality denotes an experiential engagement; it is from a position of interaction where public and private spheres collide, that notions of habitation are suspended. Through a process of dislocation, the artwork negotiates new sites or environments, which challenge the ideology of 'home' through a reshaping of individual experience.

Gosford Regional Gallery, NSW, Australia

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