A Tidy House features new work by the art collective Sixfold Project – Raewyn Biggs, Barbara Dover, Louisa Ennis-Thomas, Julie Poulsen, Rose Rigley and Jennifer Valmadre. These contemporary artists engage with the complexities surrounding the concept of the home in inventive and diverse ways.
Exploring the home/house dichotomy, interpretations of the universal, familiar and tangible architectural structure arise. But the home is, above all, a private and personal realm where we experience much of our lives internally.
During a period of uncertainty with environmental, economic and social change, an examination of ‘the home’ is particularly timely. For most of us, the home is a place of comfort, refuge and security, while, for some, it might be a space of loneliness, displacement or difficulty.
Throughout our lives, the house remains central. As children, we play house: making, building, imagining and dreaming in these make-believe spaces. This play serves as a rehearsal, perhaps, for later in life when, we aspire to create and occupy our own living spaces as adults.
In A Tidy House, Sixfold Project artists employ the gamut of their multidisciplinary art practices to investigate the significant role that the house continues to hold in all our lives.
IMAGE:
Barbara DOVER
Home Sweet Home (installation detail) 2024
cast soap
various
Courtesy of the artist
Photograph: Michael Marzik
The Cairns Art Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which we work and live. We pay our respects to Elders past and present. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this website may contain images, names or voices of deceased persons in photographs, film or text.