Where’s Home For You?
Workshop inspired intallation
AgeUK Ealing
2025
The workshop became a space for listening and exchange. We played housie, shared tea, and talked. As someone younger and from a different background, I felt the distance — not always easy to bridge. It reminded me how care, time, and sensitivity are essential when entering spaces like this. While the experience was generous, it also made me reflect on the limits of my role. Since then, I’ve turned to second-hand sources — archives, oral histories, and personal records — as a way to ground my work more thoughtfully when engaging with lived narratives.
My first response took shape as a suspended paper installation — a British-style house, light and translucent. Its familiar exterior framed objects in each window: a shawl, a rosary, a shoe. These stood for the quiet interiors of people’s lives — things carried, held, and remembered. The work reflected on double belonging, and the gap between how we appear and what we hold within.
Visitors were invited to write their own reflections of home in the blank windows, transforming the piece into a collective story — a living map of memory and migration.
Alongside, I began a second material study using black and white garbage bags. Onto them, I hand-stitched objects from memory and conversation — a comb, a cooking pot, a pair of slippers. The plastic gave a fragile translucency; the stitched lines felt like drawings made of care. These became quiet portraits of identity, drawn from the ordinary. The choice of garbage bags — materials often seen as disposable — was intentional: here, they held weight, tenderness, and meaning.
Together, the works explore how home — real or imagined — is built not just from place, but from the things we carry. Objects as anchors. Stories as architecture.