Welcome home ... detail of Leave Home Stay
A few months ago I had the idea of turning my old family home into an art installation for Riba's Architecture week. All of it. Every room exposed and open to scrutiny, right down to the sitting room's Victorian soil foundation.
I've been working on it for weeks now, and today it all kicks off - 10 days of (literally) open house, in an event supported by the Arts Council.
Every day next week I'll be blogging about what it feels like to live in a place that is simultaneously a studio space, gallery, museum, archaeological site, former family home, a place of transition, and my current house.
Just now I am filming (and being filmed), taking photographs, making a podcast and a soundscape of kitchen sounds. It's a compilation of all the ways I have excavated and investigated my house as a journalist and archaeologist, and now exploring it artistically gives me a personal platform for discussing something pretty universal: home.
My project is about what "home" means, and what the idea of home-as-commodity in 21st-century Britain is doing to our psyche. About how we deal with the loss of people, and place. And how memory is retained in the fabric of a building in less obvious ways: 1960s panelled doors, polystyrene tiles, the point where century-old skirting boards meet internet connections, or the holes left by a redundant bakelite socket.
This is not a quintessential heritage site; it's no listed building, and has been much altered over the years. But that, I hope, is part of the appeal - a semi-detached, pebbledash-fronted house in a suburban street in a small seaside town.
It's the same town where I started my journalism career, and to which I never thought I'd return, but found myself doing just that. After my parents died I put the house on the market, but, as developers hovered (apparently it wasn't a home, but a project), I dug my heels in and decided to stay for as long as I could.
Presenting a BBC radio documentary on the experience, which I called "Leaving Home", in tandem with a series of images of the house in transition, kicked off the art idea. And when the taking up of rotten floorboards revealed a ready-made installation, I was on a roll.
I have taken some liberties in the garden. Playing with the time the Channel breached the sea wall (and wrecked our carpets) in the late 70s, I have "flooded" the lawn, shrubs, trees, and washing line with art works made from beach salvage, anglers' litter and seaweed. There are flying cuttlefish up the wall (homage to 1950s wallpaper, long gone) and skeins of tangled fishing line in the dead branches of a conifer. A Prospero bothy, of sorts, moves like a sea wall with the wind and weight of brilliant blue plastic.
Not least, this project also gives me the chance to use the wonderful journalistic cliche: "From the outside number 58 Golf Road, Deal, Kent, looks like any other family home. But inside ..." I can't wait for it to open.
